their engineering efforts on advanced technology development

That Windows 8 is set to arrive in the near future raises further possibilities regarding the types of contributions GaN substrates bring. As an example, consider the fact that 20% of the Ultrabooks currently employing touch panels reportedly experience weakened brightness upon frequent use of the touch screen. A highly capable LED chip made from GaN substrates, in essence, can be utilized to amend issues like these in addition to improving resolution performance for devices like the Macbook Pro or enhancing displays for tablets like Microsoft’s soon to be released Surface.

these unpatterned wafer inspection systems are designed to meet the demanding defect and surface quality characterization requirements of the 20nm node and beyond, enabling control of the manufacturing process for 450mm polished silicon and epitaxial silicon substrates. The Surfscan SP3 450 also delivers critical capability for manufacturers of 450mm process equipment, such as wet clean tools, CMP pads, slurries and polishers, film deposition tools and annealing systems.

“Optimization of wafer quality and cleaning performance are important first steps toward demonstrating the potential economic benefits of the wafer size migration,” said Hans Lebon, fab manager at imec, a leading nanoelectronics research center in Leuven, Belgium. “Wafer manufacturers need to deliver substrates with pristine surfaces to meet chipmakers’ tight specifications. Equipment manufacturers need to ensure that they are not adding defects; that cleaning processes are effective; and that film quality is carefully controlled over a larger wafer area. The new Surfscan SP3 450 inspection system will help imec characterize the defectivity and surface quality of the wafer, map film thickness and roughness uniformity, and even identify annealing issues. We feel that it’s a critical enabling tool for the transition to 450mm.”

“Whether their wafers are 300mm or 450mm in diameter, our customers will need the performance that the Surfscan SP3 can deliver at the 20nm node and beyond,” said Ali Salehpour, senior vice president and general manager of the Surfscan / ADE division at KLA-Tencor. “The SP3 remains the only unpatterned inspection platform in the industry to use sensitivity-enabling deep ultra-violet (DUV) illumination, and it is the only tool of its kind with the ability to generate high-resolution maps of surface quality. Another advantage of the 450mm version of the Surfscan SP3 is that the performance and reliability of its optics and algorithms have already been proven on the more than fifty 300mm SP3’s installed at advanced development and production sites around the world. Confidence in their inspection platform will allow our customers to focus their engineering efforts on advanced technology development.”