We're hiring! Take the next step in your career with us.

Applications

Next Level Contamination Detection and Analysis

Our technology will improve chip manufacturing yield significantly and prevent critical yield excursions. Our customers will be able to increase their profit due to a much more efficient and hence also more environmentally friendly and sustainable production.

The application range of our technology within the whole semiconductor value chain is very manifold, targeting not only all chip fabs, but also many of their vendors and sub-vendors.

The areas of applications can be divided into two main categories, Process Control and Liquid Defectivity.

Process Control with Test Wafers

Test or monitor wafers are constantly used in chip production for process control by numerous diverse methods.

The UNISERS technology complements existing processes for test or monitor wafers and provides additional benefits for process and contamination control.

In particular, our unique and faster chemical characterization of individual nanoparticles with molecular fingerprint spectra provides very valuable information for our customers to enable: 

  • More sensitive and relevant monitoring of chip production
  • Faster ramp up phase of a new or upgraded fab
  • Development, introduction and quality control of equipment, components, chemicals and new processes

Our novel capability becomes even more crucial for upcoming nodes, where organic contaminants are the dominant reason for low yields and yield excursions. Conventional technologies fail to detect or identify many of these critical organic contaminants.

Chemical Defectivity ​

Hundreds of different formulations of ultra-pure liquids and processing chemicals are critical for chip production. However, they are also the main source of critical contaminations and the main risk for yield excursions leading regularly to enormous losses in chip fabs. Current analysis and monitoring methods fail to provide relevant predictions on how much relevant contamination is generated on a wafer from a certain liquid under real processing conditions.

At UNISERS, we developed a method that covers this metrology gap in chip manufacturing. Our method has been tested successfully for diverse liquids and processes in close collaboration with our customers. Our partners in the IRDS yield enhancement community rate our technology as key for solving several of the main challenges on the chip manufacturing roadmap.

Using our novel approach of chemical defectivity analysis will significantly help prevent contaminating liquids entering the fab at all. At the same time, our technology boosts the development of even more pure liquids and enables the introduction of new chemicals to the fabs that are more efficient and less toxic to the environment.