Waferless Recipe Generation For Overlay Metrology Tools Announced

9/29/2005  Bend, OR - Accent Optical Technologies announced the availability of SynRG (Synthetic Recipe Generator), a new "waferless" recipe creation application for its Caliper elan and Q240AT overlay metrology instruments. SynRG takes known design details about device layout, and processes them to create a metrology recipe automatically optimized for the product and process. By using advanced image simulation methods, SynRG is able to model real-world behavior, and produces recipes which are robust even when affected by the variations which commonly occur in semiconductor fabrication processes. Waferless recipe creation has many advantages. Process flow becomes much more efficient and easier to manage: instead of waiting for the arrival of a wafer and an engineer to write a recipe, the parameters required to create the recipe can be input to SynRG in advance so that the recipe is available as soon as the wafers arrive at the metrology tool for measurement. Reduced recipe creation time represents major cost savings in equipment and manpower. Further, automating recipe creation is good for data quality, removing many uncertainties and inconsistencies from the recipe creation process. Hugh Fink, Product Marketing Manager for Accent's Overlay Metrology products reports that customers who have implemented SynRG enjoy a more than 4x improvement in recipe creation efficiency. SynRG works by the direct entry of alphanumeric "design data" -- target layout and location information -- into the metrology tool or an offline workstation. It is also very straightforward to implement a system to provide this data automatically from the semiconductor fab's design database to the metrology tools. This reduces manpower requirements even further and lessens the chances of operator errors affecting measurement results. It also allows for efficient scheduling.   SOURCE: Optical Technologies