MICRO:Outlook 2000 (Nov '99)

Program Mentor, Yield Management Tools, Front-End Process Division, We need to get in the trenches In terms of the key trends for 2000 and beyond, let me first refer to the key focus areas that we are paying attention to and have been for at least a couple of years. The first one is the yield modeling and defect budget focus area. The second one is defect detection. The third focus area is defect sources and mechanisms, and the fourth one is defect prevention and elimination. Within the Sematech member company community, one of the key needs is the ability to look down holes and trenches, which is one of the key challenges facing defect detection that we are addressing with suppliers. That is only going to get more difficult simply because as you shrink down the feature sizes the inspection tools that we are using right now, especially in the optical arena, must keep pace. It is difficult to resolve the features, much less classify them. It's a tall order to do that. Then given the copper technology on the horizon, or in some cases actually out the door, like at IBM and Motorola, copper planarization and dual damascene processing is going to become the mainstream in the foreseeable future. Therefore, it is going to become increasingly important to understand any defect formation inside trenches, and high-aspect-ratio inspection, called HARI, is the area of concern here. Head, ULSI Technology Research Dept., We're pushing up against fundamental physical limits now in scaling these devices, so my primary concern is whether over the next 10 to 20 years we're still going to be able to improve the performance and cost and functionality of these devices at the same rate that we have. As for Moore's Law, what I always tell people is