Yield enhancement, driven by defect inspection, metrology and process control, offers chip makers, and manufacturers of other specialized silicon devices where thin film uniformity and contamination issues are also yield-critical, the best opportunity to control costs and improve efficiency.

Existing optical inspection and metrology tools do not support rapid, sensitive, full wafer surface chemistry mapping, as they are not designed to provide information on non-visible monolayer contamination or charging defects.

Qcept’s ChemetriQ® technology inspects for non-visual defect (NVD) contamination offering a real-time insight into process parameter effects on chemistry uniformity during production.  Qcept's patented ChemetriQ wafer inspection platforms enable customers to improve yield and profitability with production speed technology that provides non-destructive full wafer, sub-monolayer sensitivity, and high-resolution mapping of wafer surface contamination and film non-uniformity.  It has a variety of applications in semiconductor and MEMS production to improve yield.

Driven by the patented Scanning Surface Potential Difference Sensor, the system supports high-speed, ultra-sensitive inspection of 200mm and 300mm wafers. Developed from more than 10 years of government-backed research at the Georgia Institute of Technology, the Scanning SPDI sensor is a very high data rate, non-contact instrument capable of detecting extremely small chemical variations of surfaces under inspection, based on the principle of electronic work function of materials.

Another key component of the ChemetriQ platform is Qcept’s proprietary image processing and visualization software. The software produces high-level, full-wafer maps, line plots and other easy-to-use data representations, and features a robust set of advanced image processing techniques and operator options (filters, thresholds, scaling, etc.) for data visualization and defect detection.

These capabilities combine with the Scanning SPDI sensor’s unique output to support rapid defect analysis and sourcing – a much need capability for today’s yield managers who need to see what they can’t see.