Apr 6 2008
Applied Materials, Inc. today announced the shipment of its 2,500th CMP(1) system, marking a major milestone in the industry and ten consecutive years of CMP technology leadership for Applied. Installed at virtually all major semiconductor manufacturers, Applied's CMP systems have enabled transitions to advanced technologies for multiple generations of logic and memory devices.
As part of this record achievement, Applied doubled its installed base of CMP systems for 300mm manufacturing to almost 1,000 systems in just two years. The majority of these shipments were for the company's most advanced CMP platform, the Applied Reflexion(R) LK.
"Our 2,500 CMP systems have brought manufacturable solutions to some of the toughest CMP challenges across multiple applications, including copper damascene, STI(1), oxide, polysilicon and tungsten," said Lakshmanan Karuppiah, general manager of Applied's CMP division. "Our Reflexion LK system, which is already the leading CMP system for planarizing copper interconnects in logic applications, has now achieved production status at multiple memory customers, helping them succeed with their transition from aluminum to copper interconnects and accelerate their time to market."
Applied has differentiated its CMP technology by providing the industry's tightest process control, most effective wafer clean and world-class planarity performance to deliver enhanced yield and significantly lower chip costs. The Reflexion LK system's integrated Desica(R) cleaner uses unique Marangoni(TM) vapor drying to ensure residue-free, post-clean performance, the key to low defectivity. The system's three high-speed planarizing platens and multi-zone Titan Contour(TM) polishing heads enable superior within-wafer uniformity with high throughput for all CMP applications.
Last year, Applied extended real-time process control for dielectric CMP with its FullVision(TM) in-situ endpoint system for 45nm and beyond design nodes. FullVision combines the company's patented window-in-pad technology with broadband spectroscopy for improved endpoint accuracy, enabling higher CMP yield by minimizing wafer scrap caused by drifts in consumable sets and incoming profile variations
Posted April 6th,2008