Head of Product Marketing, Patterning Control Division Applied Materials
It is over a decade now since Dennard scaling broke and the semiconductor industry had to move in ever more innovative ways finding new ways to scale. These new ways include new materials such as high k metal gates, epi growth for stressors on the transistor channel, new architectures such as new memories, new materials, stacks and processes to enable EUV lithography, advanced packaging, and new structures using the 3rd dimension, with 3D NAND and GAA while 3D DRAM is expected just around the corner. Today in order to achieve sufficient PPAC (Power, Performance, Area, Cost) improvement to account for a full node, several of the above techniques need to be developed and deployed jointly. This lengthen new nodes time to market which is very significant to Semiconductor manufacturers profitability. In the effort to accelerate development and shorten time to market Metrology and inspection (M&I) play a key role. In this talk I will discuss the patterning control aspects of M&I. I will argue that nowadays "Everything is 3D" and that the 3D challenge is not limited to GAA, 3D NAND and 3D DRAM. I will focus on the role of eBeam in patterning control and demonstrate how its fundamental characteristics are a perfect match to tackle advanced node process challenges
