Manufacturing Analytics in chip production and semiconductor manufacturing
Our customer, a successful producer of semiconductors, had problems with production yield. niologic supported the data analysis and the post-mortem diagnosis of defective dies.
Challenge
As part of a best practice approach, our customer had introduced a new sub-process in production. After the introduction of the process, the plasma-deposited coating systems proved to be sufficient for a physical quality analysis. During process integration, however, it turned out that the wafers produced contained dies with significantly different quality characteristics.
Procedure
During the FEOL characterization it had already become clear, that the wafers contained reproducible dies with lower quality properties in electrical characterization.
niologic analyzed the FEOL data of the physical and electrical characterization with spatial resolution, i.e. considering the geometric position of test structure and die position.
By analyzing the geometric information, it quickly became clear that the defective dies occurred in radial patterns. A comparison of the process parameters revealed that an additional plasma step had been added.
Result and customer value
Based on the rapid analysis, the customer was able to initiate countermeasures and bring the yield back to normal with the following lots. Further on, the influencing plasma process step could also be introduced through simulation and adjustments.
