Hitachi High-Tech Corporation today announced the Development of its Electron Beam Area Inspection System.

The device manufacturers are beginning to utilise EUV in the mass production of 5nm node devices and the development of 3nm node devices.

As circuit pattern dimensions manufactured using EUV lithography are approximately half of the size of those produced by ArF lithography, systems that can inspect and measure these smaller patterns reliably, accurately and in a repeatable manner have become essential to managing production lines and yields.

Particularly, quality assurance of advanced EUV masks to reduce variations in circuit dimensions and randomly occurring microscopic stochastic defects characteristic of EUV lithography becomes of an utmost importance.

Consequently, the need for high-throughput, high-resolution inspection and measurements is increasing in line with the expansion of number of inspection targets.

Hitachi High-Tech is responding to this increased demand for high-speed, sensitive inspection and measurements over a wide area and is launching GS1000 system to fulfil the needs of semiconductor device mass-production market.

Key Features:

GS1000 is an advanced conventional Electron Beam Inspection system. It is a fusion of a high-performance electron optical system and a high-speed, large-capacity data processing system, which provides solutions to the challenges that arise when introducing EUV lithography to semiconductor device mass-production.

This system has the following key features:

1. New technology capable of a high-speed, wide-area e-beam inspection

By using optical aberration correctors developed through advanced electron optical system designs, wafers can be imaged by electron beam with no degradation of resolution within a wide area of the electron beam movement, enabling high-precision inspection and measurements over a wide area. This system uses a combination of a fast-changing field of view using beam shift and a sensitive inspection technology to enable high-precision, wide-area scans 100 times faster than conventional CD-SEM tools.

2. High-speed, large-capacity image processing system

Dedicated high-speed image processing system provides ultra-fast data transfer enabling high throughput, performing real-time D2DB measurements through parallel processing using high-speed 4K imaging and image transfer servers.

It also introduces D2AI algorithmic inspection, utilising AI technology to handle processing of the vast amounts of data created by the increasing number of points being inspected and measured to meet the needs of fast detection of process variation and microscopic defects.

By: DocMemory
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