Semiconductor 300 is the first pilot manufacturing facility for 300mm wafers in the world. This company is a joint venture between Siemens and Motorola, formed for the purpose of developing a 300mm manufacturing tool set. The pilot line contains a full compliment of tools for DRAM manufacturing. This paper discusses the performance of the initial 300mm lithography tool set installed in our pilot line in Dresden, Germany. The product used for evaluating and debugging the tool set is a 0.25-micron ground rule 64 Meg DRAM. This was chosen for the ability to easily benchmark against 200mm DRAM manufacturing data. We have produced several lots of wafers with measurable yield. These lots have produced data on overlay, CD and run to run performance of the lithography tools on actual product. We have data on resist coating, and develop uniformity. With several lithography tools installed we have generated a large amount of mix and match data. In addition several challenges for successful lithography have surfaced related entirely to the increase in wafer size. Film, etch, polish and thermal non-uniformity have impacted the throughput and performance of the lithography tools. The installation of the first integrated 300mm pilot line has also produced data on the impact larger wafer size has on tool logistics, for example fab layout, installation schedules and wafer and lot transport. While technical data is always important, the main reason for converting to 300mm is economic. We now have preliminary data on the comparison of 200 tools to 300mm tools in terms of footprint, throughput, and productivity gains for equivalent square centimeters of silicon. With this data we can start to make preliminary recommendations for 300mm manufacturing tools.

Date Published: 26 July 1999
PDF: 14 pages
Proc. SPIE 3679, Optical Microlithography XII, (26 July 1999); doi: 10.1117/12.354360

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 3679:
Optical Microlithography XII
Luc Van den Hove, Editor(s)