Nanometrics Announces 1,000+ Optical Critical Dimension Recipes in Production

Nanometrics Incorporated NANO today announced a significant milestone marking the adoption of its optical critical dimension technology. More than 1,000 “recipes,” algorithms to analyze and model critical structures, are now in production at semiconductor and data storage manufacturers around the world. OCD technology allows manufacturers to make non-destructive measurements of film thickness, as well as the width, height, length, depth and pitch of structural features on both the surface of a layer and in previous process layers below the surface. The flexibility of OCD tools to provide all of these measurements, often simultaneously, has created a commanding position for the technology in process control metrology. Demand for OCD technology has increased as manufacturers reduce devices to smaller and smaller geometries, while adding many new process layers and steps at the same time. “As manufacturers are challenged to scale down devices, the tolerance for variation is reduced,” said Nagesh Avadhany, vice president of Global Applications at Nanometrics. “This drives the need to make additional measurements to monitor and control the process at every step. As a result, process control measurements are increasing with the advancement of these devices.” In fact, over the past two years, the number of recipes for semiconductor chips in manufacturing at 2X nm and 3X nm nodes has grown at twice the rate of other technology nodes.