Dark-field Scattering Technique Wafer Surface Defect Detection Of New Applications Research

With the fast evolution of IC manufacture process technology, the technology node of wafer processing has been scaled down from 45nm to 32nm. The stability and reliability of wafer process will be most challenged. At the same time, process monitoring with wafer defect inspection way, reduction of yield loss, rising qualification rate, are becoming more and more important and critical. Therefore, the importance of wafer defect inspection has been widely recognized.Among all kinds of wafer defect inspection technology, it plays an important role for unpatterned wafer surface inspection. This thesis introduces defect inspection technology by collecting scattering light on wafer surface (Chapter 1 & 2). Based on this technology, I did some investigation on several new application cases of current inspection method.In chapter 3, I did some testing on some films with new specification. The applicability of current inspection tool on these new films was proved by both good sizing accuracy and good stability.In chapter 4, the powerful software of haze processing was used in some new application cases. First, some kind of relationship between haze signal value and wafer surface roughness is proved, a correlation curve about it is created accordingly which data comes from series of testing. This case can be another new method to measure wafer surface roughness in Fab. Secondly, there are some kinds of extreme micro-defects which can not be detected by traditional inspection methods. Experimentations show the feasibility to detect such kind of defect by haze signal analysis.There is a summary of all investigations done in chapter 5, also looked into the future of this technology.