Massive metrology for process development and monitoring applications

With continuous scaling and increased design and process complexity, there is an increasing need for semiconductor manufacturing process control. This need calls for not only advanced methods and more capable tools, but also additional intra-wafer and across-lot sampling in order to capture process variations and/or changes in process signatures. In this paper we will demonstrate high speed full wafer metrology use cases from the KLA CIRCLT platform. The CIRCL platform is typically used for very high throughput inline macro defect inspection. Here we demonstrate that this tool can also be used for certain types of metrology applications. In this paper, we will investigate metrology opportunities with full wafer coverage for critical process parameters on two test vehicles: (1) a 32nm pitch regular line-and-space defect vehicle patterned with single exposure EUV and (2) an iN7 BEOL integration test vehicle, also patterned with single exposure EUV.