Cyberoptics wireless wafer sensing
July 2015 – At Semicon 2015, we met with Cyberoptics which has in chamber sensor tools for monitoring wafer fab equipment. Currently the sensors are on 200mm and 300mm products right now as well as reticle products. They are currently getting ready to release 150mm products and in the near future 450mm products. The products we saw were the WaferSense and ReticleSense products. These are available in single and multi-sensor forms for a variety of wafer process monitoring applications.
The common thread on all of these products is the ability to provide wireless information to the operator while the devices are in a normal workflow (including wafer and reticle handling robots) and under vacuum. The data communication is by BlueTooth which can be used both at normal pressure and temperature as well as when the device is in wafer fabrication mode where the chamber is pulled to a low press vacuum. The results of the data are tracked in software available from Cyberoptics.
The wafers sensors includes the gap sensors that provides non-contact gap measurements and parallelism adjustments under vacuum for semiconductor processes such as thin-film deposition, sputtering and etch. A multi-sensor wafer product that provides 5 point measurement for setting the right inclination by measuring pitch, roll, rise overrun and vertical inclinations. A wafer vibration sensor that monitors 3-axis accelerations and vibration on the wafer stage to enable yield improvement & throughput by measuring maximum acceleration and providing real time data to minimize vibration. And an airborne particle sensor that monitors, identifies and enables troubleshooting of airborne particles down to 0.15um within semiconductor process equipment and automated material handling systems in real time.
The reticle sensors include the multi-sensor that measures inclination by measuring pitch, roll, rise overrun and vertical inclinations and the airborne particle sensor which measures,, identifies and enables troubleshooting of airborne particles down to 0.15um in real time. The reticle sensors are also available in a version that is targeted towards mask manufacturers in addition to the semiconductor manufacturing versions.
The data that is collected goes into their own software tools for monitoring, but for archive purposed and data analytics, the data is exportable to CSV format. The products which are being used by both the wafer fabs and fabless customers to collect inline data for yield improvement and optimization are all currently available. Additional information can be found at : http://cyberoptics.com/semiconductor_categories/wafersense/
