Qcept Technologies’ ChemitriQ5000 may help GlobalFoundries vs. TSMC in gate-first HKMG integration for 32nm foundry customers with fab metrology for control of yield excursions

Semilab, founded in 1990 and headquartered in Budapest, Hungary, is spending cash to continue to expand its portfolio of fab metrology offerings. Today, the company announced it has acquired Advanced Metrology Systems (AMS) and QC Solutions. The two Massachusetts-based metrology companies expand Semilab’s family of scalable, flexible solutions to help semiconductor and solar manufacturers characterize […]

Nanometrics today announced the release of Version 2.0 of its NanoCD Suite of solutions for optical critical dimension (OCD) metrology, just one year after V1 was released. OCD (a.k.a., “scatterometry”) has been used to successfully control fab processes for many years. The major known limitation of the technique is model building from reference metrology data, […]

Partners SII NanoTechnology and Carl Zeiss NTS have joined with ASML R&D and Toshiba’s process and manufacturing engineering groups to show a new way to create accurate cross-sections of soft photoresist and low-k dielectric lines in dense circuit patterns. First shown in a poster paper at SPIE last week was the ability to generate accurate […]

One year after this editor covered an SPIE panel on reference metrology and summarized the situation as “there is no more noise; there is only signal,” another lively panel at SPIE this evening discussed the need for not just precise but accurate critical dimension (CD) measurements in advanced IC lines. With smaller structures and reduced […]

Metrosol has joined SEMATECH’s Front End Process Technologies Program at the College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering (CNSE) of the University at Albany to address metrology and data-analysis solutions for 45nm node and beyond IC fabs. The joint partnership will expand on current work to develop inline metrology techniques to monitor the thickness and composition […]

At Levitronix’s Ultrapure Fluid Handling and Wafer Cleaning Conference on February 11th, Particle Measuring Systems reviewed the limits of being able to detect things we do not want to find in flowing fluids, as enabled by a new digital detector array they call NanoVision Technology. Steven Verhaverbeke, tool design expert for Applied Materials who presented […]

CMP applications experts gathered in Santa Clara, California on February 10th to share their experience and expertise at the fifth annual seminar sponsored by Levitronix. Leading developers, manufacturers, and end-users of CMP discussed all aspects of the technology, and since Levitronix makes magnetic levitation (MagLev) pumps there were many thorough presentations on slurry distribution issues. […]

Veeco has exited betas with a new Atomic Force Microscope (AFM) named Dimension® Icon™ that provides small-sample resolution for large-samples. Building upon the successful Dimension AFM platform, the latest member of the product line delivers the highest resolution, best ease-of-use, and fastest time-to-results of any large-sample AFM on the market today. “With the Icon AFM, […]