Virtual Equipment Engineering: A continuous simulation chain leveraging development of new semiconductor manufacturing equipment

Pushing semiconductor manufacturing equipment capabilities to the physical limits is a must to follow Moore's Law in the mid-term future. That is why a novel paradigm of developing new semiconductor manufacturing equipment is needed. Already during the early stages of equipment development, it is inevitable to know as much as possible about the future equipment behavior. Equipment developers need to know about the influence of their development measures on the process and even on interdependencies with other processes to successfully design new leading edge equipment. Therefore, a continuous simulation chain is appropriate to get as much information as possible prior to manufacturing the first physical prototype. This paper presents the first-time demonstration of such a continuous simulation chain ranging from the CAD model of a semiconductor manufacturing equipment to the run time behavior of a transistor device fabricated with that equipment. Based on the concept of Virtual Equipment Engineering this approach allows to keep the simulation chain consistent through changes in the CAD model without manually updating the equipment simulation models. The development of an oxidation reactor is used as an example to demonstrate the principle possibility of such a simulation chain. Within this example the programs used are PTC Pro/ENGINEER, ESI CFD-ACE and Synopsys SProcess.