Improvement of AME 8110 oxide etcher daily clean

In semiconductor manufacturing, continuously increasing production capacity to meet customer demand is a big challenge for many mature fabs. Purchasing new equipment or building additional fabrication areas are rarely the options. New ways to improve capacity using existing resources must therefore be explored. Motorola's Bipolar 3 fab has done this in the case of Applied Materials 8110 reactive ion etchers (RIE). The 8110 RIEs at Bipolar 3 were shown to be the bottleneck machines by the capacity model due to a recent production ramp. For this reason, the capacity of the 8110 RIEs needed to increase the overall equipment effectiveness of these machines was analyzed. It was found that 82% of the equipment downtime was due to system cleans. This clean was performed daily and consumed an average of 5 hours per machine per day. It was assumed that the long clean was necessary to keep equipment defectivity low. This paper describes how a new daily clean procedure was developed and implemented in a production environment to dramatically reduce the equipment downtime. The paper also describes how the new clean procedure improved the equipment defectivity performance.