Advanced process control for furnace systems in semiconductor manufacturing

Shinde, Satyajit; Sonar, Amit; Sun, Yaqi

doi:10.1109/asmc.2013.6552819

Cited by 11 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 8 publications

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“…S EMICONDUCTOR technology is the basis for the affluence and convenience of the modern world and plays an important role in a low-carbon society. Due to the demand for exponential improvements in computing power thanks to the shrinking of circuit critical dimensions and the introduction of 3-dimensional integrated circuits [1]- [3], the requirements for accuracy, productivity, and yield in semiconductor manufacturing processes increase year by year [4]. Thermal processing in semiconductor furnaces is an important process that involves oxidation, annealing, diffusion, or chemical vapor deposition.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Fast and Precise Temperature Control for a Semiconductor Vertical Furnace via Heater-Cooler Integration

Ohnishi

Hirata

Shibatsuji

et al. 2023

IEEE Trans. Semicond. Manufact.

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Semiconductor vertical furnaces must achieve even faster and more precise temperature control due to the demand for ever-reducing the minimum feature size or critical dimension in semiconductor chips. Also, the insulation performance of vertical furnaces has improved to reduce power consumption; as a side effect, temperature reduction operation takes longer without active cooling. Therefore, in addition to heaters, vertical furnaces equipped with coolers have emerged to achieve higher productivity, more precise temperature control, and lower power consumption. However, the inability to generate positive and negative control inputs for one of the heaters or coolers poses a challenge for an intuitive controller parameter design. The aim of this paper is to address these issues by proposing an intuitive method for designing a controller in the frequency domain which virtually integrates heaters and coolers. We implemented the controller in a full-scale actual semiconductor vertical furnace and first confirmed that the linearity is high. Furthermore, we experimentally verified that the controller achieves both high-speed, high-precision temperature control and low power consumption.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Fast and Precise Temperature Control for a Semiconductor Vertical Furnace via Heater-Cooler Integration

Ohnishi

Hirata

Shibatsuji

et al. 2023

IEEE Trans. Semicond. Manufact.

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“…Furthermore, because of the large physical dimension of the batch ALD systems, they are much more susceptible to batch-to-batch variation and process disturbances compared to single wafer systems [16,17]. Therefore, it is beneficial if on-line controllers, integrated with run-to-run control schemes, can be formulated and implemented for the batch ALD processes [18].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Integrating Feedback Control and Run-to-Run Control in Multi-Wafer Thermal Atomic Layer Deposition of Thin Films

2019

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There is currently a lack of understanding of the deposition profile in a batch atomic layer deposition (ALD) process. Also, no on-line control scheme has been proposed to resolve the prevalent disturbances. Motivated by this, we develop a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model and an integrated online run-to-run and feedback control scheme. Specifically, we analyze a furnace reactor for a SiO2 thin-film ALD with BTBAS and ozone as precursors. Initially, a high-fidelity 2D axisymmetric multiscale CFD model is developed using ANSYS Fluent for the gas-phase characterization and the surface thin-film deposition, based on a kinetic Monte-Carlo (kMC) model database. To deal with the disturbance during reactor operation, a proportional integral (PI) control scheme is adopted, which manipulates the inlet precursor concentration to drive the precursor partial pressure to the set-point, ensuring the complete substrate coverage. Additionally, the CFD model is utilized to investigate a wide range of operating conditions, and a regression model is developed to describe the relationship between the half-cycle time and the feed flow rate. A run-to-run (R2R) control scheme using an exponentially weighted moving average (EWMA) strategy is developed to regulate the half-cycle time for the furnace ALD process between batches.

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A multi-step wafer-level run-to-run controller with sampled measurements for furnace deposition and CMP process flows: APC: Advanced process control

Sun¹,

Reichelt²,

Bormann

et al. 2016

2016 27th Annual SEMI Advanced Semiconductor Manufacturing Conference (ASMC)

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Advanced process control for furnace systems in semiconductor manufacturing

Cited by 11 publications

References 8 publications

Fast and Precise Temperature Control for a Semiconductor Vertical Furnace via Heater-Cooler Integration

Fast and Precise Temperature Control for a Semiconductor Vertical Furnace via Heater-Cooler Integration

Integrating Feedback Control and Run-to-Run Control in Multi-Wafer Thermal Atomic Layer Deposition of Thin Films

A multi-step wafer-level run-to-run controller with sampled measurements for furnace deposition and CMP process flows: APC: Advanced process control

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