KLA-Tencor announces three new wafer defect inspection systems

MILPITAS, USA: KLA-Tencor Corp. announced three new wafer defect inspection systems for leading-edge chip manufacturers: the 2900, Puma 9650 and eS800 systems. This new flagship suite is designed to address the wide range of defect issues that new materials, structures and design rules have imposed on manufacturers of advanced chips.

The new 2900 Series broadband optical wafer defect inspection platform extends optical wafer defect inspection to new limits, with significant strides forward in defect capture on challenging layers and die areas, and capture of yield-relevant defects as small as 10nm.

Complementing the 2900 is the new Puma 9650 Series narrowband optical wafer defect inspection system, which advances the Puma product line's unique combination of sensitivity and throughput to new heights of performance on many layers, including difficult gate etch layers.

To capture extremely small defects or shallow residues, or defects inside deep, narrow structures, the new eS800 Series e-beam wafer defect inspection platform can leverage its proprietary design for achieving high electron beam current density.

Each of the inspection systems in the new portfolio features seamless connectivity to the recently introduced eDR-7000 e-beam wafer defect review system. With outstanding sensitivity and review speed, the eDR-7000 completes the process of identifying the defect types found by the inspectors, allowing engineers to address defect issues promptly and disposition wafers accurately.

"Our leading-edge customers have a wide variety of defect problems to solve, the most difficult of which involve finding tiny or subtle defects amidst pattern noise, deep inside a capacitor, or in otherwise difficult environments," said Mike Kirk, group VP of Wafer Inspection Group at KLA-Tencor. "The trio of new inspection systems that we are announcing today incorporates exceptional work by our engineering teams: new, more powerful light sources or electron guns, innovative signal shaping and a multifold approach to reducing noise. The resulting advancements in signal-to-noise are impressive for each tool. We believe that these three products will play a vital role in enabling our customers to bring their next-generation logic and memory devices to market."