Advanced solutions for yield improvement: 'Super PI'.

Some plasma processes such as etching produce non-uniform electrical characteristics during device fabrication at the front-end manufacturing process. This variation in electrical properties causes the yield of transistors to decrease. In the front-end process, ion implantation has the advantage of high-precision controllability such as dose distribution which can be used to compensate for the variation in electrical characteristics of the device. We have developed a method which can compensate for the non-uniformities caused by different front-end processes during device fabrication. Patterning Implant (PI) system is one of the procedures that utilizes a combination of beam sweeping and stepwise wafer rotations. With this approach, different dose distributions on the substrate can be achieved. However, the PI system needs several rotational steps for a ring-pattern dose distribution. In addition, the system cannot be applied to processes such as halo implantation due to tilt angle dependence. Furthermore, the required dose distribution is not always the concentric ring shape which limits the application of the conventional PI system. To address this issue, we have developed the Super PI system which can provide dose distributions of any shape without the need for wafer stepwise rotation. Performance of the Super PI was evaluated in various implant conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]