Minienvironment Process Monitor: MiniNet
Why it is Important to Particle Monitor Minienvironments?
The semiconductor industry continually drives to decrease the cost and increase the performance of computer chips. A key to meeting these goals is reducing chip sizes and squeezing more chips onto the 300 mm wafer. As the industry moves to 300 mm technology, smaller and smaller particles will impact chip performance. The solution is to develop cleaner and cleaner manufacturing processes.
The minienvironment (or isolator) is a key design element in this process - just as for the data storage and pharmaceutical industries. By building protective enclosures that fit snugly around each tool, the volume of air to keep clean is reduced significantly. By combining this with other design elements (such as robotics, filtering and FOUPs), it becomes possible to get minienvironments 100 times cleaner than previous generation cleanrooms.
While minienvironments are significantly cleaner, it is still essential to monitor particles in them continuously for real-time for particle events:
- Although it is possible to get a minienvironment clean, it is impossible to keep it clean. Over time sealants degrade, robot arms start to wear. FOUP slots can become misaligned, causing wafer breakage. Only real-time particle monitors can send alarms when events first begin to occur.
- While minienvironments are usually clean, those particle events that do occur are much closer to the product, increasing the potential for product damage.
- It can be more difficult to detect particle events than in traditional cleanrooms. Events in minienvironments are often localized in space and short in duration. Particles can impact the product without being detected by occasional spot checks with test wafers - or even by single-point monitors.
- As more and more chips are squeezed onto a single wafer, and as multiple wafers are sequestered in a single FOUP, it becomes more expensive than ever to miss detecting a particle event.
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