Surface Microdefects Control during Chemical Mechanical Polishing of Silicon Wafers: an Example of in line Manufacturing Process Control

For the process control / improvement in Chemical Mechanical Polishing in silicon wafer production line, the automatic laser inspection tool (SP1) and on-time manufacturing database system are utilized for monitoring of various defects. In order to improve the most relevant defect, polishing scratch, the modeling on the morphology of the defect was developed and connected to SP1 and the database system, so that the source and mechanism of defect generation are easily and quickly identified and analyzed. The validity of the modeling was further confirmed with the microscopic instruments such as Nomarsky Microscope and AFM with sophisticated data transfer function from SP1 and database system. Several examples of their application during the continuous process improvement activity are reported