Today KLA-Tencor Corporation
(NASDAQ:KLAC), a leading provider of process control and yield management
solutions, partners with customers around the world to develop state-of-the-art
inspection and metrology technologies, announced XP, a new upgrade package for
28xx broadband brightfield inspection systems.
The XP package is the first commercially available product to give an inspection
system access to standard IC design layout files — the instructions that
enable mask shops to pattern the mask. With access to this information, the
inspection system can use knowledge of the defect’s location within the
circuit to better estimate its probability of affecting device yield. In addition,
XP can use the results of the design-aware wafer inspection to identify features
on the mask that may be particularly sensitive to process variations during
printing. These and other features of the XP upgrade package are designed to
improve the sensitivity and productivity of existing 28xx inspectors and raise
the information content of defect results, helping to accelerate identification
and resolution of defect issues.
“As chip complexity and price pressure increase in our consumer-driven
markets, our customers are asking for tools to facilitate root-cause defect
analysis, improve their productivity, and effect faster, more efficient ramps,”
remarked Mike Kirk, Ph.D., vice president and general manager of KLA-Tencor’s
Wafer Inspection Group. “Today our leading-edge fabs have to cope with
advanced lithography techniques that enable 193nm lithography to print features
with dimensions nearly one-tenth the illumination wavelength, dimensions that
can now be measured in countable atoms. In this environment, even the smallest
defect on a wafer or marginal pattern on a mask can have an enormous yield impact.
Our new XP package represents a major step forward in addressing our customers’
need to optimize defect capture and identify systematic and other yield-relevant
defects from a sea of irrelevant or ‘nuisance’ defects. Moreover,
XP can provide this valuable capability cost-effectively: as an upgrade for
inspection systems that already exist in most leading-edge fabs.”
The new XP package includes several features designed to improve inspection
results or inspector productivity, including:
- Preferential capture of yield-relevant defects — during inspection
— based on the density of the circuit pattern at the defect site;
- Optimization of defect capture throughout all areas of interest within
the die by using circuit design information to set highly localized defect
detection thresholds according to pattern group;
- Early detection of marginal lithography conditions, enabled by close monitoring
of pattern types having the smallest process margins; and
- Offline generation of derivative “recipes” — the optical,
mechanical and algorithm parameters settings that govern the inspection —
for new layers or new devices. This feature, one of several recipe acceleration
features, can significantly reduce time and labor required for recipe setup,
thereby increasing inspector productivity and making recipe optimization feasible
even for small lots or rapid prototyping of devices.
Offered as an upgrade to the widely adopted 281x and 282x brightfield inspection
systems, the XP package has been shipped to multiple foundry, memory and logic
fabs and has been featured in more than 20 technical papers.