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(Digital Presentation) An Advanced Process Control Scheme for Fin Etching Process in Front-End-of-Line Finfet High Volume Production

Tuesday, 31 May 2022: 09:00
West Meeting Room 115 (Vancouver Convention Center)
J. Song, X. Ke (Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation), E. N. Zhang (Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp.), S. Ji, Z. Zhao, C. Zheng, Z. Li (Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation), and H. Y. Zhang (Semiconductor Manufacturing International (Shanghai) Corporation)
As FinFET scaling down to sub-14 nm technology nodes, fin profile and Critical Dimension (CD) control is becoming a huge challenge due to increased number of processes. For a stable wafer-to-wafer CD performance, Advanced Process Control (APC) system is widely deployed in high volume manufacturing production. In this work, we present a novel implementation of APC-based fuzzy control system in fin etching process within the widely-used Self-aligned Quadruple Patterning (SaQP) scheme. Feed-forward APC are applied to the two processes: 1) Atomic Layer Deposition (ALD) process for fin hard-mask etching and 2) fin etching process with a fuzzy control. With the deployment of the APC system, the inline metrology variation performance of fin CD improved from ±3.5% to ±1.8%. The Cp and Cpk are increased by 18% for various key inline parameters. The APC-based fuzzy control scheme shows a great potential for the sub-14 nm nodes.