Park NX-Wafer

Product Overview

Park Systems Automated AFMs are engineered to excel wafer fabrication metrology, offering a precise toolset for critical measurements and analysis tasks. These advanced systems facilitate the detailed metrology required in semiconductor wafer fabrication, providing consistent, accurate, and extensive data that supports improved manufacturing processes and product quality. Designed to integrate seamlessly with existing fabrication lines, they deliver a robust solution for semiconductor production engineering and quality assurance. Park NX-Wafer is the industrys leading automated AFM metrology system for semiconductor and related fabrications. It provides wafer fab inspection and analysis, automatic defect review for bare wafers and substrates, and CMP profile measurements. Park NX-Wafer has the highest nanoscale surface resolution with sub-angstrom height accuracy, scan after scan with negligible tip to tip variation and preserved tip sharpness unmatched by others. Park NX-Wafer with its automated system features including auto tip exchanger, live monitoring, target positioning without reference marks and auto analysis makes the best semiconductor AFM tool in the industry.

Basic Information

Automatic Defect Review for Bare Wafers:

The new 300 mm bare wafer ADR provides a fully automated defect review process from transfer and alignment of defect maps to the survey and zoom-in scan imaging of defects that uses a unique remapping process that does not require any reference marker on a sample wafer. Unlike SEM which leaves square-shaped destructive irradiation marks on defect sites after its run, the new Park ADR AFM enables advanced coordinate translation with enhanced vision that uses the wafer edge and notch to automatically enable linkage between a defect inspection tool and the AFM. Since it is fully automated, it does not require any separate steps to calibrate the stage of the targeted defect inspection system, increasing throughput by up to 1,000%.

Sub-Angstrom Surface Roughness Control:

Semiconductor suppliers are developing ultra-flat wafers to address the ever-increasing need for shrinking device dimensions. However, there has never been a metrology tool capable of providing accurate and reliable measurements for the sub-Angstrom roughness of these substrate surfaces. By delivering the industrys lowest noise floor of less than 1 Å throughout the wafer area, and combining it with True Non-Contact mode, the Park NX-Wafer can make accurate, repeatable, and reproducible sub-Angstrom roughness measurements for the flattest substrates and wafers with minimized tip-to-tip variation. Very accurate and repeatable surface measurements can be obtained even for the long-range waviness measurement of scan sizes up to 100 μm x 100 μm.

Long Range Profiling for CMP Characterization:

Planarization is the most important step in the back-end processes where metals and dielectric materials are used. Both local and global uniformity after chemical mechanical polishing (CMP) affect the yield of chip manufacturing significantly. Accurate CMP profiling is a critical metrology necessary to optimize process conditions for best planarity and improve production yield. Combining Park NX-Wafer with a sliding stage provides a long range profiling capability for CMP metrology. Due to the unique stage design of Park's automated AFM, the combined system provides very flat profiling and there is no need for complex background subtraction or past processing after each measurement in general. The Park NX-Wafer enables unprecedented CMP metrology of both local and global planarity measurements including dishing, erosion, and edge-over-erosion (EOE).

Key Features

• Automatic Tip Exchange
  
• Ionization System for a more stable scanning environment​
  
• Automatic Wafer Handler (EFEM or FOUP)
  100 µm x 100 µm Flexure-Guided XY Scanner with Closed-loop Dual Servo System
  15 µm High Speed Z Scanner with Low Noise Position Sensor
  
• Automatic Measurement Control