DTFab: A Digital Twin based Approach for Optimal Reticle Management in Semiconductor Photolithography
DTFab: A Digital Twin based Approach for Optimal Reticle Management in Semiconductor Photolithography
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DOI：
10.1007/s11518-023-5564-x
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发表时间：
2023-05
影响因子：
1.2
通讯作者：
Chandrasekhar Komaralingam Sivasubramanian;Robert W. Dodge;Aditya S. Ramani;David Bayba;M. Janakiram;
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Chandrasekhar Komaralingam Sivasubramanian;Robert W. Dodge;Aditya S. Ramani;David Bayba;M. Janakiram;
光刻是芯片制造中的关键阶段之一。它也是最昂贵的制造设备之一，价值数亿美元。至关重要的是，该流程能够高效运行，确保高资源利用率和较短的产品周期时间。光刻系统操作中的一个关键因素是对负责在晶片上压印电路路径的掩模进行有效管理。管理掩模版意味着根据向系统发布的产品类型确定哪些适合安装在非常昂贵的扫描仪上。考虑到问题的重要性，在行业实践中已经制定了几个启发式政策，试图保证昂贵的工具永远不会闲置。然而，这类政策难以对意外事件(如计划外故障、无法获得引线)作出反应。另一方面，应该利用半导体行业在系统和工艺层面上在传感方面的技术进步来改进这些“专家政策”。在本文中，我们开发了一个用于实时网线管理的系统，该系统不仅能够从实际系统中检索信息，而且能够嵌入常用的策略来改进它们。我们为光刻工艺开发了一种新的数字孪生兄弟，它可以高效而准确地预测系统性能，从而使我们的系统能够根据可能的决策对未来的行为进行预测。我们的结果证明了所开发模型的有效性，以及整体方法的可行性，表明与当前的策略相比，性能在统计上有显著的改善。
Photolithography is among the key phases in chip manufacturing. It is also among the most expensive with manufacturing equipment valued at the hundreds of millions of dollars. It is paramount that the process is ran efficiently, guaranteeing high resource utilization and low product cycle times. A key element in the operation of a photolithography system is the effective management of the reticles that are responsible for the imprinting of the circuit path on the wafers. Managing reticles means determining which are appropriate to mount on the very expensive scanners as a function of the product types being released to the system. Given the importance of the problem, several heuristic policies have been developed in the industry practice in an attempt to guarantee that the expensive tools are never idle. However, such policies have difficulties reacting to unforeseen events (e.g., unplanned failures, unavailability of reticles). On the other hand, the technological advance of the semiconductor industry in sensing at system and process level should be harnessed to improve on these “expert policies”. In this manuscript, we develop a system for the real time reticle management that not only is able to retrieve information from the real system, but also is able to embed commonly used policies to improve upon them. We develop a new digital twin for the photolithography process that efficiently and accurately predicts the system performance, thus allowing our system to make predictions for future behaviors as a function of possible decisions. Our results demonstrate the validity of the developed model, and the feasibility of the overall approach demonstrating a statistically significant improvement of performance as compared to the current policy.