Implanter Source Life and Stability Improvement Using In-Situ Chemical Cleaning

Current 300 mm fabs rely heavily on automation to provide manufacturing efficiency. While implant processes and equipment follow this trend, tool availability and maintenance cycles are often driven by the ion source and adjacent areas which suffer from premature failures due to unwanted material deposits. While working in a high volume production environment, side by side comparative data has been collected on two tools running similar processes, with one tool having integrated in-situ cleaning cycles and the other with no in-situ cleaning. This paper will discuss significant improvements achieved in beam stability, glitch rate, ion source lifetime and maintenance cycles which were achieved on the tool with integrated in-situ cleaning. A program was established at Texas Instruments' DMOS6 wafer fab in early 2007 to explore and document process and equipment performance. Other critical areas, such as particle and metals contamination will be discussed with inferences as to potential yield improvements.