Applied Materials Precision 5000 CVD lamp module health monitoring for improved fault prediction/detection

摘要

Higher product flows require more and more equipment stability and uptime. Maintenance procedures have to be planned tough and fault events should be recognized early enough to make sure that process equipment will be available as much as possible for production. In case of predictable failure detection maintenance staff would be able to solve problems quickly and well scheduled if they will be informed just in time. Tool unscheduled down time can be reduced significantly to a minimum level for a maximum of uptime. Also expensive wafer scrap events can be avoided if failures and irregularities can be detected and predicted surly and prematurely. The AMAT P5000 with its internal lamp current monitoring allows no predictable fault detection for the lamp heater module. If only one lamp is damaged, usually the tool will not react with limit violation and furthermore there will be no alarm event. Uniformity of this thermal CVD process will be poor which will lead to wafer scrap in critical cases. As soon as alarm mode is activated, the tool will interrupt the process immediately which also leads to wafer scrap in certain cases. There could be defined a specific limit violation function within APC were the wafer process will be not interrupted anymore and even the next run will be inhibited.