Process Control in semiconductor manufacturing : A KLA-Tencor perspective

Company Background

KLA-Tencor is a leading edge silicon valley company that specializes in developing state of the art Machine Vision Inspection & Metrology Systems to service the needs of semiconductor chip makers such as Intel, Samsung, Toshiba, TSMC, IBM etc. We are an established silicon valley company with a start-up mentality. Our systems typically replace the human eye in the semiconductor fab. The challenges are enormous … we have to detect defects which are well below the wavelength of light and to do this very fast.

Just about every engineering discipline is pushed to the limits at our company…

Optical (Visible/UV/DUV) Microscopy & Metrology, Coherent & Incoherent Illumination systems, Precision Mechanics, Material Science , High Speed Imaging & Electronics (FPGA design), Signal & Image Processing Pattern Recognition Algorithms…and of course software to pull all this together. We typically ship a super-computer with every system to do the processing in real time ! We have a history of joint innovation with suppliers and customers. As an example, we co-developed the first commercial usage of CCD TDI (Time Delay Integration) sensors that were initially pioneered for deep sky imaging in astronomy.

In summary, we have opportunities for engineers who wish to develop deep competencies in any of these areas while at the same time fostering inter-disciplinary skills coupled with on the job training to become outstanding system engineers.

We have an excellent tuition reimbursement program for higher learning and also have distance learning partnership programs with Stanford, San Jose State and the University of Michigan. The company has long been one of the more profitable companies in the valley. Our intellectually challenging yet friendly work environment and stock plans have enabled us to keep our best and brightest engineers.

More informatation. on KLA-Tencor can be obtained by visiting our web site at www.kla-tencor.com. Check out our college program.
KLA-Tencor a leading process control and yield management company in the semiconductor industry will talk about the industry challenges in manufacturing going forward and will provide an overview of their solutions and approaches in Metrology and Inspection.

The first part of the talk will cover critical challenges that leading edge semiconductor companies face in keeping the promise of Moore’s law alive. The industry is headed towards developing the first 10 nm, 3-D chip ! The current industry workhorse 193 nm lithography is running out of steam, yet doubts persist on the viability/costs of the expected 13.5 nm EUV solution. Significant new materials are being experimented with as the industry struggles to battle power constraints. The talk will then briefly cover the current portfolio of inspection & metrology platforms that KLA-Tencor is shipping.

The second part of the talk will give an architectural overview of one of our inspection systems. It will also include a deeper dive into a few of the sub-systems including a novel opto-electronic-mechanical image registration and alignment sub-system. If time permits we will also touch on some of the challenges we see in exploiting emerging GPU/SIMD architectures for image processing

The speakers are Kris Bhaskar, VP of Systems in the CTO office and Eliezer Rosengaus, Systems Architect in the CTO Office. Eliezer has an academic background in Nuclear Fusion and has over the years architected a number of inspection systems. His current areas of interest are in designing and our next generation image super computers. Kris has a background in Image Processing and Pattern Recognition and has held a number of management positions in engineering as well as strategic business development. His current interests are in designing algorithms to “cheat physics” as well as in the emerging markets for 3D structures.