Apr 24 2013
Qcept Technologies Inc. today announced that it has received an order for multiple ChemetriQ® 5000 non-visual defect (NVD) inspection systems from one of the world's leading semiconductor device manufacturers.
The systems have already been shipped and will be used for 1X-nm-node front-end-of-line (FEOL) and back-end-of-line process (BEOL)development. This latest order marks an important milestone for Qcept, which now has systems installed and in use by four of the top five semiconductor device manufacturers ranked by sales revenue.
"The introduction of new materials, processes and device structures at smaller design nodes are giving rise to a growing number of NVD-related yield-loss issues in the fab. This latest multiple-system order for the ChemetriQ 5000 system demonstrates the growing recognition among leading logic, memory and analog device manufacturers that NVD inspection is an important part of a fab's overall yield management strategy, including leading-edge process development," stated Robert Newcomb , executive vice president of Qcept Technologies.
Qcept's ChemetriQ inspection technology is uniquely capable of inspecting any layer on any wafer at any time—without time-consuming recipe setup—and providing customers with important defect data about their process that cannot be obtained from optical inspection systems, which require a unique recipe specific for each layer and device type, and which are blind to NVDs. This capability is ideally suited for unit process development, integration and yield engineering, where line partition studies can be done with a single recipe to understand how NVDs evolve in a given module, and how they affect downstream physical defects and end-of-line yields.