Aug

29

One big friend gathering at AMAT Singapore Tech Forum

Filed Under Equipment, Foundry, Movers and Shakers, Video Gallery | Leave a Comment

I attended the Applied Material Technology Forum (AMTF) yesterday at the Marina Mandarin Hotel, Singapore, together with my 7 colleagues from AMD. To my pleasant surprise, I was delighted to meet up with many old friends from all over Singapore in this event. There are many friends from my previous company STMicroelectronics. They told me that life is still pretty much the same after the change in company name to Numonyx. l also saw many good old Fab 2 Thin Film gangs. Some of them still works in Chartered, while others have moved to other companies, like SSMC, UMC, Siltronic and IME. Amazingly, all of them still looks pretty much the same. There is no sign of aging even after more than 10 years!! I also met up with a few old friends from AMAT. I guess I am the one who know the most participants in this event. During the luncheon, there was a table half filled with Chartered folks, and the other half occupied by STMicro folks. I bet I am the only one that know all of them in that table. haha.

In my opinion, this conference is very interesting and informative. Chartered CEO, Chia Song Hwee, kicked start the event with an insightful prescription for collaborative alliance. He drove home the points that the escalating R&D cost and slowing revenue growth have effectively forced companies, even competitors, to seek collaboration to improve cost efficiency, mitigate risk and shorten time-to-market. However, he stressed that the basis of this collaborative alliance is win-win, and individual company must still leverage on their core competences to win business. After that, Sanjay from AMAT gave a detailed internal analysis of the industry, the evolution of industry towards fabless-foundry model, the fabs demand and supply. By and large, he painted a rather optimistic outlook of the industry. After the morning break, Peter Cheang from ASML gave a very good overview of the lithography challenges beyond 45nm. He analyzed the challenges in terms of three fundamental parameters in the famous Rayleigh’s equation: k1, NA and lamda. Now, I understand why double patterning (DP) technology is needed for breaking the k1 limit of 0.25 since it is really difficult to find high-index fluid to increase NA. He then advocated the necessity of EUV lithography to go beyond 32nm for friendly k1. I was really impressed by his talk. I also understand now how AMAT comes into the picture of lithography segment. AMAT is apparently collaborating with ASML to develop carbon-based dielectrics for various hard mask and DP schemes. After the luncheon, there are two parallel sessions. One focused on FEOL high-k/metal-gate/laser-anneal, while the other focused on litho and metrology. I attended the later since I always want to learn something that I don’t know. :D

I’ve received the presentation slides for the Applied Material Singapore Tech Forum. I have uploaded three of the keynote presentation slides here. One on high-k metal-gate, one on industry outlook and the last one on ASML lithography roadmap. You could also view all the Applied Material presentation on my slideshare site.

All in all, this is a very successful event. I saw this nice video from AMAT website. I like their new tagline: “Think it, Apply it”. To me, knowledge is useless if you don’t apply it.


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Aug

27

KLA Tencor Singapore Seminar Focused on 45 and 32nm Yield Capability

Filed Under Metrology, Video Gallery, Yield Mgt and DFM | Leave a Comment

KLA Tencor has just conducted a Yield Management seminar in Singapore last Friday, 24th Aug 2007 at the Swissotel The Stamford. Unfortunately, I missed this seminar. So, I borrowed the seminar agenda and brochure from a friend. He mentioned to me a couple interesting topics covered in this seminar:

KLA Tencor Puma
  • Dr. Jeffery Su, Director of Xilinx, presented a keynote speech on “Yield Management from the perspective for a fabless semiconductor company”. He compared the strengths and weaknesses between fabless and foundry for yield management. Generally, the fabless is strong in product level, while the foundry is strong in process level. Therefore, fabless and foundry complements each other in yield management and should collaborate closely.
  • Mr. Frank Burkeen from KLA Tencor introduced the VisEdge CV300 tool for wafer Edge inspection. It is kind of interesting to know there are specialized defect inspection metrology tools out there just to detect and classify the wafer edge defects. This shows how important is wafer edge defects these days and their substantial contribution to yield loss.
  • Mr Scott Corboy from KLA Tencor presented the SpectraCD-XT for inline optical critical dimension (OCD) measurement. Scatterometry-based OCD tools are increasingly deployed in the fab as they have higher throughput than conventional CD-SEM. In addition, they are capable of measuring complicated line profiles such as spacer thickness on product wafers.

While the above seminar is focusing primarily on 45nm metrology tool set, the technologists in KLA Tencor have already considered 45nm more or less a done deal and are now focusing on the forthcoming metrology challenges in 32nm (Ref). This is typically the case in semiconductor industry. The equipment makers have to at least be one node ahead of Fab, so that they could provide the necessary tool set for process development in the Fab. Below is an interesting interview of KLA Tencor CEO, Rick Wallace, by VLSI Research. Rick mentioned that KLA Tencor is actually not a yield management company, although this seems to be the company vision advocated few years ago. The fab and fabless are the ones that do the yield management. What KLA Tencor does most of time is to provide tool solutions to fab and fabless.

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