Sustainability in Semiconductor Manufacturing

Money is always going to be vitally important, but there's a renewed emphasis on sustainability in semiconductor manufacturing. How can fab operators hit both objectives, reducing costs and cutting emissions and waste?

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One of the key steps is a simple, but powerful, shift in approach: from time-based process control, to event-based control.

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There is a fundamental inefficiency associated with time-based process control, Most of the time, the process will finish significantly before the allotted time, which results in unnecessary inefficiencies and over cleaning. Instead, by moving event-based process management, the process is stopped when a particular event or state is reached (for cleaning this is called End Point Detection), for example the concentration of a specific gas. This requires continuous monitoring in-situ metrology tools, such as Aston from Atonarp.

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Find out more here.