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An Interview with Didier Lamouche Chief Executive Officer of Altis Semiconductor.
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Are you suggesting 2040 as the year when the semiconductor industry will be mature?
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I think maturity will come much sooner than 2040. While the automobile industry took something like 60 years to become mature, I think the semiconductor industry will mature much faster. The key difference is in the penetration rate of the technology. The number of applications for our products is enormous and growing every day. To keep this growth, we have to become mature very fast—within 10 or 15 years.
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You have emphasized yield prediction, but you have not indicated what tools we might use to accomplish this. What priority do you place on wafer inspection tools and software to calculate yields?
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When you want to ramp up the yield curve on a product, you may encounter specific design or process related problems like junction leakages, and topology effects that might leave some residue that causes shorts or open contacts or voids. Failure mechanisms are really dependent on the design and integration of functions. I would emphasize CAD techniques that include layerby-layer simulation of your design, simulation of the growth of the layers, deposition of films, and uniformity of the films and of the edge.
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Didier Lamouche is Chief Executive Officer of ALTIS Semiconductor, a newly formed joint venture between IBM and Infineon, located south of Paris, France.
The simulations will help predict which local areas on the chips are more likely to be difficult to etch, or are more likely to be susceptible to pattern density effects. Then, before you place the product in production, either you address the sensitive areas by internal redundancy, or you focus your inspection tools on this specific area to control it very tightly and to catch any excursions.
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To address the two different approaches for success—the prediction of failure modes and keeping the yield up when you are in ramp or sustaining phase—do you recommend different organizations working in these two specific areas, or having a single organization working on both parts?
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I think the ideal organization would have one group focused on the product integration, process integration, and yield understanding, and another one focused on the operations, tool maintenance, etc. Such an organization would be best equipped to ramp up very quickly and to surmount the challenges that I have been describing.
Spring 2001
Yield Management Solutions
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