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New Product: Novaâ??s â??MatMaker,â?? solution significantly cuts optical CD measurement time
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Product Briefing Outline: Nova Measuring Instruments has launched ‘MatMaker,’ a Product-Driven Materials Characterization package, which is based on software algorithms and tools refined by Nova’s applications developers over the past 10 years. The company claims the new software changes the way spectral Optical CD is deployed in fabs, significantly reducing application development time and cost while at the same time increasing the measurement accuracy.
Problem: Spectral Optical CD technologies need material optical properties (spectral n&k) to interpret the optical spectrum into a profile measurement. Until today the industry standard was to measure material properties on blanket wafers, layer by layer, a process that takes from days to more than a month, well in advance of actual Scatterometry application development. In addition to the obvious drawbacks of significant plan-ahead and time investment, this method could not account for material changes that occur during wafer processing, changes that affect material properties and the accuracy of the final measurement.
Solution: Nova's novel technology eliminates this step-by-step method. It capitalizes on proprietary breakthrough algorithms for enhancing the sensitivity of Scatterometry measurements, directly utilizing Scatterometry targets on the product wafer to determine the optical properties of the various constituent materials together with the geometrical profile parameters. Multiple film depositions on blanket wafers are no longer needed as a prerequisite for Scatterometry applications development, and any and all process-induced changes to materials optical properties can now be uniquely and accurately captured inside the Scatterometry model.
Applications: Optical CD solutions are widely used in Etch, Lithography, CMP and CVD, in many cases to can replace CDSEM systems.
Platform: The MatMaker package is available as an option to the latest version of NovaMARS Applications Development Software.
Availability: July 2009 onwards.