Editor's Comments |
Peter J. Delfyett
This issue marks the Third Annual Special Issue of the LEOS Newsletter. The main idea behind the Special Issue is to provide our members with a selection of articles on a focused research topic, as compared to a variety of articles spanning many areas in our regular issue.
This month’s Special Issue is a collection of articles from the recent IEEE Summer Topical Meeting on Optical Sensing in Semiconductor Manufacturing which was held during the week of July 23-26 in Aventura, Florida. An additional feature of utilizing one of the Topical Meetings as the focus for the topic of interest in our Special Issue is that it provides a birds-eye view of a LEOS meeting for our members who were unable to attend.
In this issue, we have a total of 10 technical articles that were chosen from selected invited talks at the Topical Meeting.
Our first article is an overview by Kris Bertness from NIST, who describes the conference and places the technical articles in this issue in a perspective consistent with the goals of the Topical Meeting. A selection of the remaining technical articles contain summaries of their invited presentations:
Chris Hovde (Southwest Sciences) discusses the use of multipass absorption cells to measure trace concentrations of water vapor based on wavelength modulation spectroscopy using near-infrared diode lasers.
Harold Anderson (University of New Mexico) writes on the use of mid-infrared (3-12 µm) diode lasers to follow CFx radical formation during plasma etching of silicon. The optical sensing tool functions both as a research tool to identify the reaction mechanisms and as a process tool for endpoint and fault detection.
Harland Tompkins (Motorola Labs) describes the widespread use of spectroscopic ellipsometry and reflectometry as a diagnostic tool for the varied thin-film deposition processes that occur in the manufacture of silicon circuitry.
Lucymarie Mantese (University of Texas, Austin), presents research in using nonlinear processes to monitor surface reactions using the example of silicon/germanium growth on silicon.
Bill Breiland (Sandia National Laboratories) shows how normal-incidence optical reflectance spectroscopy (ORS) has become a standard pre-run calibration tool for both OMVPE and MBE growth machines at Sandia.
Dave Aspnes (North Carolina State University) presents his work on the more general case of polarized light probes, including spectral ellipsometry and reflectance difference spectroscopy.
Shane Johnson (Arizona State University) discusses band edge thermometry, a recently developed technique in which the temperature of a semiconductor wafer is determined from in situ measurements of its band gap.
Kris Bertness (NIST) presents an article illustrating another application of in-situ measurements that are used to increase the amount of information available for determining composition with high absolute accuracy.
The articles selected for this special issue are designed to provide an overview of how optical sensing technologies can have widespread use in semiconductor growth and characterization. I hope this Special Issue provides a stimulating perspective for your thoughts.
Comments and suggestions: delfyett@creol.ucf.edu or p.delfyett@ieee.org. Comment and suggestions: delfyett@creol.ucf.edu or p.delfyett@ieee.org