The impact of single-wafer processing on fab cycle time

摘要

Rapid thermal processing is already the convention for processessuch as silicide annealing, and is being studied as an alternative forvirtually every other thermal process in modern CMOS process flows.Single-wafer cleaning is also a broad area of research and development,both in industry and academia, although single-wafer cleaning is not asmature a technology as rapid thermal processing. This paper's objectiveis to show how single-wafer processing can improve a fab's throughputtime. Throughput time (also called cycle time) is the length of timethat passes from when a wafer enters a fab to begin processing until allwafer processing is completed and the wafer is ready for final probe.This paper only considers front-end processing