Current state of 300-mm lithography in a pilot line environment

Abstract

SEMICONDUCTOR300 (SC300) is the first pilot manufacturing facility for 300 mm wafers in the world. This company, a joint venture between Infineon Technologies and Motorola, is working on developing a 300 mm manufacturing tool set. The pilot line contains a full compliment of tools for 0.24 micrometer ground rule 64 M DRAM manufacturing. The 64 M DRAM was chosen for the ability to easily benchmark against 200 mm 64 M DRAM manufacturing data from the sister factory. Currently, testing on structures with less than 0.20 micrometer ground rules is occurring the pilot line. In this paper we present the performance of the initial lithography tool set installed at SC300. Several lots of wafers with measurable yield have been produced. These lots have produced data on overlay, critical dimensions, and run-to-run, wafer-to-wafer and within-wafer performance of the various lithography layers. We now have preliminary data on the comparison of 200 mm tools to 300 mm tools in terms of footprint, throughput, reliability, and productivity gains for equivalent square centimeters of silicon. With this data we can start to predict what performance we should expect from 300 mm manufacturing lithography tools.