New tool detects electrical issues and small physical defects; helps optimize high-speed optical wafer inspection systems for preferential capture of yield-relevant defects

KLA-Tencor Corporation (NASDAQ: KLAC) announced the eS805™, a new electron-beam inspection system for leading-edge chip manufacturers. Benefiting from more than twenty years of KLA-Tencor's e-beam inspection development and manufacturing expertise, the eS805 offers strong capability in detection of very small defects and defects that cause electrical problems in the integrated circuit, such as opens, shorts or reliability issues. The eS805 is also designed to provide supplementary information to the fab's optical inspection systems, with the goal of boosting the ability of the optical inspectors to preferentially capture defects that matter.

"As our customers move toward single-digit nanometer design rules, they will need unprecedented sensitivity to defects of interest—while sampling enough of the wafer to catch a defect excursion," said Bobby Bell, executive vice president of KLA-Tencor's Wafer Inspection Group. "We believe that optical inspection will continue as the dominant defect inspection approach; its speed is essential for adequate wafer coverage, and our engineers have demonstrated some impressive ideas for stretching optical sensitivity to meet our customers' anticipated requirements. Electron-beam inspection will continue to complement optical inspection as needed, and we are continuing to innovate within our e-beam product lines for speed, application breadth and novel methodologies. The new eS805 represents a significant step forward in KLA-Tencor's continually evolving e-beam/optical defect solution, a valuable addition to our industry-leading optical defect inspection/e-beam review portfolio."

The high performance of the new eS805 is driven by the following advances:
•    New image computer, new auto-focus subsystem, and higher beam current densities than other commercially available systems, enabling detection of buried electrical defects in "voltage contrast" ("VC") mode over relatively large areas of the die;
•    Architecture designed to elicit significant signal from defects hidden at the bottom of high aspect ratio (HAR) structures such as FinFETs and 3D flash; and
•    Advanced algorithms that, together with the new image computer and auto-focus system, enable efficient capture of small defects within non-periodic structures, such as logic areas of the cell.

The eS805 is upgradeable from any previous eS3x or eS8xx-series e-beam inspection system, an approach that helps protect a fab's capital investment.

New eS805 e-beam inspection systems have been shipped to leading logic and memory chip manufacturers, where they are being used to upgrade existing e-beam inspection capability or to fulfill requirements for additional inspection capacity in advanced development and production lines. To maintain high performance and productivity, the eS805 tools are backed by KLA-Tencor's global, comprehensive service network.