Reliability Baseline Management and Applications in Semiconductor Manufacturing

Reliability assessment is very important in semiconductor manufacturing, and we need to setup and maintain an efficient and effective reliability baseline (BL) management system to, for example, assess reliability risks, to dispose impacted lots, and to release equipment. To achieve these goals, we propose a corresponding flow and pinpoint the critical points to establish and maintain reliability BLs. To provide insights to readers by actual cases on reliability BL analyses and applications, we setup and analyze the BLs for the electric-field acceleration factor and activation energy of gate oxide, the gate voltage exponent of device Negative Bias Temperature Instabilities (NBTI), and the parameters of interconnect model for current density and activation energy. We also find the enriched reliability BL database does benefit line excursion disposition, process optimization, quicker judgment on the reliability impacts of nonconformance, feasibility studies of process changes, faster tool releases, risk assessments of common reliability tests, and earlier root cause identifications of abnormality by narrowing down failure mechanisms.