Improving the efficiency and effectiveness of integrated circuit manufacturing technology development

Summary form only given. This paper presents a new integrated circuit manufacturing technology development (TD) paradigm for the semiconductor industry and compares it with the conventional approach. First of all, a typical IC manufacturing TD process is modeled by a sequence of tasks. These tasks are process design to generate process profiles (that is, distribution of impurity species into the silicon substrate), device design to characterize the process and generate device models and product design to achieve the target product specifications. The entire technology development cycle is divided into three major phases: (1) the generation of initial guess process recipes; (2) process optimization to generate process and device specifications; and (3) the evaluation of process manufacturability. It is shown that, in the conventional TD, these phases are achieved by an iterative method of processing wafers in a fab, performing electrical tests, comparing results with the target performance objectives, and randomly modifying the process parameters to meet the targets.