The most prolific real-time monitoring of the Ultra-Clean Manufacturing Environment is in the form of particle count concentrations via bench top laser particle counting devices. This would be expected as the primary source of air quality monitoring due to the relatively low cost ($5,000 to $25,000) and the portability of the devices. It is however to become of increasing importance for continued yield enhancement and feature refinements (line widths) in the semiconductor industry to not only know the size and concentration of contamination but the very nature of that contamination in the gas/vapor phase. IMS (Ion Mobility Spectrometry) holds the promise of becoming a method to match the cost and portability of Airborne Particle Counting while adding the specificity of ultralow contaminant identification of concentrations in the mid to lower ppb range. Presented are the types of chemicals detectable, ranges, and future development efforts necessary for wide implementation of IMS as an advanced contamination control monitoring technique.

Due to the continuing trend toward higher integration scales and smaller structural dimensions in semiconductortechnology, a new class of detrimental contaminants arises: volatile organics. Recently it has been shown that, amongothers, they cause severe problems in epitaxial growth, in oxidation kinetics, and in all wet chemical treatments of thewafer. In order to select appropriate polymeric materials for future boxes, minienvironments, or other equipment, weinvestigated the outgassing characteristics of polypropylene (PP: natural, antistatic, and blue, respectively), polycarbonate(PC), periluoroalkoxy polymer (PFA), polyvinylidenefluoride (PVDF), acrylonitrile butadiene styrene copolymer (ABS),and polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE). All samples were taken from commercial products for semiconductor technology.Each polymer was heated up from 60 to 20°C below its softening temperature with continuous monitoring of the amountof outgassing. Additionally, the outgassing components were identified separately. PTFE and PFA showed the lowestamounts of outgassings over the entire temperature range. If only selected temperature ranges are of interest, otherpolymers like PVDF or PC are almost as good. From the knowledge about particular outgassings and the understanding ofthe chemistry of the polymer, measures can be derived on how to improve certain polymers.

Discussion about number of patents filed in semiconductor industry

Recently it has been shown that for present and future scales of integration in semiconductor devices even volatile organics have a strong negative impact on process yield and product performance. Therefore, new ultrasensitive analytical methods for the detection and identification of organic volatiles are needed in process control for monitoring and for failure analysis. Very promising in this field, especially for monitoring of ultrapure process gases, are methods involving atmospheric pressure ionization, like API-MS and IMS (ion mobility spectrometry).

Epitaxy is an established technology. SOI is a new technology. How can we put these 2 technologies together?? Read to find out more!!