The Israeli division of Applied Materials has developed two new systems for Advanced Patterned Wafer Inspection for Process Monitoring. This report comes from Applied Materials International. The Israeli division, located in Rehovot, will also manufacture the new systems. To date, orders amounting to tens of millions of dollars have arrived for the two systems from enterprises in the US, Europe and Asia.
Applied Materials International president Dr. Dan Maydan said the importance of the defect detecting systems was augmented by the fact that the industry that manufactures special-purpose chips for digital instruments and Internet-based instruments is undergoing an accelerated process of miniaturization. The higher the density of the silicon wafers, he said, the more critical slight defects become; hence the mounting importance of defect-detecting systems.
Four years ago, Applied Materials went into the control and inspection of the chip-manufacturing process. To that end, it acquired Israeli companies Orbot Instruments and Opal. The two companies' technologies helped the development center in Israel to develop a number of products intended to minimize the number of defects in the chip-manufacturing process.
The systems developed in Israel are called Excite and Compass. The Compass system is able to detect flaws in the manufacture of silicon wafers 0.1 microns in size, and is based on laser technology. The system is capable of detecting defects at relatively high speed (up to 60 silicon wafers per hour).
The Excite system enables the number of wafers used for testing purposes in the manufacturing process to be reduced to a mere 10% of total wafers, instead of 30%-40%, as generally accepted today. Each silicon wafer costs tens of thousands of dollars, and the system therefore saves chip manufacturers heavy costs.
Published by Israel's Business Arena on 4 July 2000