improvement has been approximately 300 hours per month. Engineers are now spending more valuable time investigating the “non-conforming” defects that do not show up routinely.
Figure 1. Klarity’s DFA recipe, which captures complex engi-
IMPACT/Online ADC coupled with Klarity has added value to the manufacturing process by increasing this team’s productivity and time-to-information by automating their process so that more time is spent on yield learning than on analyzing lots that go outside the control limits. The user study shows that cost savings are dramatic, operator efficiency increases twofold and engineering and technician productivity goes up by approximately 20 to 50 percent since time is now spent solving yield problems.
neering analysis methodologies into simple flowchar ts, was used to accelerate customer’s time-to-information.
With Klarity, after a lot has been inspected and classified using IMPACT/Online ADC, the data is loaded into the defect database. This event triggers an analysis recipe which is pre-set using Klarity’s Scheduler. Automatic execution of this recipe will determine if a lot is in or out of control. If the lot is out of control, Klarity’s built-in use of conditionals and filters allows it to make defect type-based decisions in order to disposition the lot. Through Klarity’s capability to merge individual defect classifications into distinct groups, the team was able to further segregate the ADC-classified defects into “killer” and “non-killer” sub-groups. This simplified their analysis process and helped them filter data for subsequent analysis steps. The “killer” defects were further analyzed automatically through Klarity’s DFA. The process steps contributing to the killer defects were identified, and any new defect types that were not grouped by Klarity as killer or non-killer were automatically sent to off-line review and SEM (scanning electron microscope) systems for further investigation. Since the implementation of Klarity and IMPACT/ Online ADC, this team has experienced dramatic reductions in cycle time. The actual cycle time
Figure 3. Stacked bar chart shows Klarity’s segregation of the ADC-classified defects into “killer” or “non-killer” groups. Once this chart is created, an automatic filter can be assigned to output only the “killer” defects to a KLA-Tencor results file for SEM review.
For more information call 800.450.5308 circle RS#014
KLA-Tencor Summer ’98 Trade Show Calendar July 13-17
SEMICON West, San Francisco & San Jose, CA, USA July 13-15 Wafer Processing, San Francisco, CA, USA July 15-17 Test, Assembly & Packaging, San Jose, CA, USA July 24-25 HeadMedia Penang, Penang, Malaysia July 27-30 Datastore Asia ’98, Singapore September 16-18 BACUS Photomask Tech & Mgmt. Redwood City, CA, USA September 22-24 Diskcon San Jose, CA, USA Figure 2. Klarity’s SPC chart was scheduled by the customer to automatically identify excursions.
Summer 1998
Yield Management Solutions
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