The common thread tying the sub-fab pillars of safety, sustainability and savings together is that, in order to improve them, one must accurately measure and quantify at high speed the managed materials and waste. There is a significant need for robust, quantified and real-time metrology both for the process chamber as well as increasingly for the sub-fab infrastructure.
The Aston family of real-time semiconductor metrology solutions from Atonarp (FIGURE 2) were designed from the ground up to support fabrication. Aston’s best in class speed 10x better than alternative legacy gas analysis solutions, and unlike optical emission spectroscopy, Aston requires no local plasma source, typically absent in sub-fab and ALD/ALE processes. Aston is a compact mass spectrometer that combines high accuracy with production-ready robustness. It provides data that is immediately actionable, enabling corrective steps to be taken quickly if and when any problems are identified.