Fractilia, a leader in stochastics measurement and control solutions for advanced semiconductor manufacturing, is tackling EUV yield challenges with its innovative solution.

Fractilia recently announced the release of the latest version of its Fractilia Automated Measurement Environment (FAME™) product, which enables semiconductor fabs to manage EUV yield issues that cost them billions of dollars.

The FAME product line provides highly accurate and precise measurements of stochastics, a major factor causing patterning errors at advanced nodes.

Fractilia's FAME products enable faster decision-making and better control of advanced patterning processes, resulting in higher device yields and patterning productivity. />
The new version of FAME is based on Fractilia's proven third-generation FILM™ (Fractilia Inverse Linescan Model) platform, which is already used by four of the world's top five chipmakers.

“As semiconductor manufacturing increasingly transitions to the EUV era, stochastics are emerging as a key yield issue,” said G. Dan Hutcheson, Vice President of TechInsights. “Fractilia’s founders, Ed Charrier and Chris Mack, were early sounding the alarm about stochastics, and Fractilia is well-positioned to help solve this problem with their stochastic control solution. They have a proven track record of successfully commercializing innovative technologies, having developed PROLITH lithography modeling and data analysis software at FINLE Technologies 20 years ago. This technology was groundbreaking for its time and continues to impact semiconductor fabs in process control today. FILM™ has also proven to be a valuable tool in helping EUV technology move out of the lab and into the fab.”

Stochastics refers to random, non-repeatable patterning errors, which account for more than 50% of total patterning errors in EUV processes.

Therefore, semiconductor fabs require accurate measurement of stochasticity to control it. While accurate and precise stochasticity measurement is difficult with existing techniques, it is a significant issue in advanced processes. It is already a problem in advanced 193nm optical lithography, particularly in double and quadruple patterning. In EUV processes, stochasticity leads to serious yield problems and increases costs.

“Stochastics forces manufacturing fabs to make trade-offs between yield and productivity,” said Chris Mack, CTO of Fractilia. “Increasing exposure to prevent yield loss reduces the productivity of the EUV scanner, which may necessitate the deployment of additional EUV scanners. Controlling stochastics can improve yield while increasing the productivity of the process equipment. Fractilia’s FAME products enable us to measure and control stochastics with high accuracy and precision, ultimately providing our customers with new options and solutions. Our customers are rapidly increasing the number of SEM images they are measuring with Fractilia, and Fractilia is becoming the de facto industry standard for stochastics measurements.”