DIAGNOSIS OF SEMICONDUCTOR MANUFACTURING EQUIPMENT AND PROCESSES

This paper describes part of the research performed during the Microel ectronic Manufacturing Science and Technology (MMST) program on techni ques for the diagnosis of equipment malfunctions and misprocessing dur ing semiconductor manufacturing. The main motivation of this work was to investigate techniques for rapid diagnosis. Towards this goal, a nu mber of equipment-level diagnosis techniques are described. These tech niques use equipment models to diagnose equipment malfunctions at a gi ven process step. The results obtained by applying these diagnosis app roaches are very encouraging. The various approaches were able to diag nose a number of faults that were deliberately introduced to test the algorithms, and the equipment faults that developed during the final d emonstration of the MMST program. These techniques were applied to a T I-built Advanced Vacuum Processor (AVP) and an Applied Materials Preci sion reactor AMT 5000.