The continual improvement of productivity is an area of increasing importance in all aspects of semiconductor manufacturing. It is of especially high priority in the Photolithography sector where equipment costs are the greatest. The overall success of the fabricator facility hinges on the productivity level of the manufacturing equipment. The majority of photolithography exposure systems in use today are configured in a linked mode of operation with a resist coater/resist developer track. This configuration, called a cluster, makes their productivity level directly dependent on each other. One aspect of productivity that has very high visibility is the actual maximum speed of the equipment itself. This paper will demonstrate the ability to improve the productivity of the cluster with Speed Enhancements; however, it will also demonstrate the opportunity for increased productivity through Availability Improvements, and Assist Reduction. This paper describes a very successful application of the analysis of the Exposure system’s equipment logs to: evaluate the Photolithography cluster’s productivity, identify improvement opportunities for the cluster, and serve as a gauge for tracking the gain from implemented improvements. To date, the project described in this paper has identified a path to increase the cluster’s output by more than one hundred wafers per cluster per day.

Date Published: 2 June 2003
PDF: 10 pages
Proc. SPIE 5038, Metrology, Inspection, and Process Control for Microlithography XVII, (2 June 2003); doi: 10.1117/12.483754

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 5038:
Metrology, Inspection, and Process Control for Microlithography XVII
Daniel J. Herr, Editor(s)