Product Briefing Outline: ATMI has introduced ‘AutoClean’, a highly beneficial technology to extend ion implant source life by more than 40 percent, increase tool predictability, and reduce operating costs.  AutoClean is a complete system solution comprised of a chemical reagent (xenon difluoride), sub-atmospheric solid delivery system, customer-specific process recipes and extensive application support.  This combination has proven highly successful in tests and in real-world working conditions to effectively remove dopant materials from inside implanters. The result is improved ion source life, reduction in glitching, extended PM cycles, increased tool availability, and an overall reduction in operating costs of ion implanters. 

Problem: Conventional maintenance of ion implant process equipment includes significant manual intervention and maintenance of the implant tool source region.  As process residues accumulate in the source, users experience operational problems such as short, unpredictable source life, and ion beam instabilities due to glitching or arcing.  Fab production flexibility is also constrained with long set-up periods for beam recovery or when switching between different implant species.  These problems have historically been dealt with through laborious manual interventions and frequent PMs, which contribute to productivity losses, and frequent exposure of fab maintenance personnel to hazardous materials when manually cleaning the source region.

Solution: The ATMI AutoClean solution delivers a safe and effective flow of a chemical reagent into the source region.  The reagent flows just like a process dopant, yet requires no plasma activation to produce a highly effective fluorinating agent to clean all contacted surfaces in the source, even those not contacted by plasma.  Automated recipes can be implemented to run the AutoClean process at regular intervals, or manually initiated for error recoveries and species changes.  As a result, the source region is cleaner and remains cleaner longer, extending source life in excess of 40% (see below).

Applications: AutoClean has been validated and released for most major implant makes and models with little if any significant hardware or software changes.  The cleaning reagent has proven effective for cleaning process residues created when running arsenic, phosphorus, and boron implant processes.

Platform: Offered as a complete system solution, AutoClean is comprised of the chemical reagent, a non-pressurized solid source delivery cylinder and process recipes tailored to each customer application based on Best Known Methods.

Availability: October 2007 onwards.