ISMI to Report Progress at SEMICON West

At next week's SEMICON West show, ISMI will meet the supplier community to discuss progress with the 450 mm and Next Generation Factory programs. The 450 mm effort is moving from automation and wafer handling testing to demonstration wafer processing equipment. Updated metrics for 60 different types of equipment were posted to the ISMI website early today.

By David Lammers, News Editor -- Semiconductor International, July 6, 2009

Leaders of the 450 mm program at the International Sematech Manufacturing Initiative (ISMI, Austin, Texas) will go to next week's SEMICON West to outline the next step in their plans: a "consortial fab" to test 450 mm demonstration equipment.

Scott Kramer, vice president of manufacturing at Sematech, said early 450 mm wafer processing equipment will be installed over the rest of this year at the SVTC-owned R&D fab at Sematech's Austin facility. In addition, 450 mm wafers will be shuttled around the globe to equipment suppliers for "distributed processing".

The consortium will hold two half-day meetings with equipment suppliers at SEMICON West, one on the 450 mm program and the other on the Next Generation Factory (NGF) program aimed at improving cycle times and reducing costs at 300 mm fabs.

ISMI last week took ownership of a particle and edge defect inspection tool from Nanophotonics GmbH (Mainz, Germany), according to Tom Jefferson, 450 mm program manager. Film thickness measurement and particle removal tools are on order and will be installed later this year to the Interoperability Test Bed (ITB) at ISMI. A major step forward, he said, is that single-crystal 450 mm wafers are now being shipped around to various equipment suppliers for R&D programs.

"A year ago," Jefferson said, "we had a few sintered wafers at the ITB. Since then we have moved to single-crystal silicon. A year ago, we had no process or metrology
equipment, and now we have particle and edge inspection. A year ago, we had one EFEM and one carrier. Today, we are testing six load ports and a number of carriers, and have completed 4 million robot handling cycles and tested 400,000 load port open and close cycles."

ISMI has held workshops with the supplier community to develop 450 mm equipment performance metrics (EPMs). Updated metrics for 60 different types of equipment were posted to the ISMI website early today.

Jefferson said the three semiconductor companies committed to the 450 mm wafer transition — Intel Corp. (Santa Clara, Calif.), Samsung Electronics Co. (Seoul, South Korea) and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd. (TSMC, Hsinchu, Taiwan) — will build 450 mm pilot lines, starting in about two years. The current EPMs are intended for the 450 mm equipment demonstrations capable of 32 nm design rules. Production equipment used at the pilot lines will target 22 nm design rules, with the "full flow of equipment to build a device."

The next EPM workshop will be held in October, and Kramer said the goal is to develop "very interactive relations with the suppliers, with information going in two directions."

Standards progress

Balloting will be conducted at SEMICON West on the standard for the load port door-opening method. Jefferson said although alternative methods were tested at the ITB, the ballot will be limited to the latch-key design used during the 300 mm generation, with "all other approaches removed."

The standard pitch (the distance between the upright wafers) in FOUPs will be increased to 12 mm for the 450 mm wafers, slightly wider than the 10 mm pitch used for 300 mm FOUPs. Although ISMI has "talked in the past about a 10 mm pitch, there is now strong alignment by the device makers and [equipment] OEMs that 12 mm is the right metric for the wafer pitch," Jefferson said.

Some advanced process nodes may have thicker metal films, and there is greater potential for wafer sag at the 450 mm diameter. "We decided to err on the side of caution," Jefferson said. "It would be a shame to have an industry full of FOUPs that can't support the potential warpage and advanced process nodes." Carrier and load port standards also are nearing completion, he added.

Jefferson said progress also was made in the first half of this year on equipment mainframes — vacuum platforms that are becoming available from multiple suppliers. That effort is designed to separate the vacuum, gas-handling and other functions, allowing the equipment suppliers to focus on wafer processing.

Kramer said 80 people, including assignees from the 16 ISMI member companies as well as direct hires, are working at ISMI now. Jefferson said 11 suppliers of tools and wafers are directly involved thus far in the 450 mm test bed, with other supplier companies sharing information on a daily basis.

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