The impact of single-wafer processing on fab cycle time

Rapid thermal processing is already the convention for processes such as silicide annealing, and is being studied as an alternative for virtually every other thermal process in modern CMOS process flows. Single-wafer cleaning is also a broad area of research and development, both in industry and academia, although single-wafer cleaning is not as mature a technology as rapid thermal processing. This paper's objective is to show how single-wafer processing can improve a fab's throughput time. Throughput time (also called cycle time) is the length of time that passes from when a wafer enters a fab to begin processing until all wafer processing is completed and the wafer is ready for final probe. This paper only considers front-end processing.