In-situ temperature and thickness characterization for silicon wafers undergoing thermal annealing

Nano scale processing of IC chips has become the prime production technique as the microelectronic industry aims towards scaling down product dimensions while increasing accuracy and performance. Accurate control of temperature and a good monitoring mechanism for thickness of the deposition layers during epitaxial growth are critical parameters influencing a good yield. The two-fold objective of this thesis is to establish the feasibility of an alternative to the current pyrometric and ellipsometric techniques to simultaneously measure temperature and thickness during wafer processing. TAP-NDE is a non-contact, non-invasive, laser-based ultrasound technique that is employed in this study to contemporarily profile the thermal and spatial characteristics of the wafer. The Gabor wavelet transform allows the wave dispersion to be unraveled and the group velocity of individual frequency components to be extracted from the experimentally acquired time waveform. The thesis illustrates the formulation of a theoretical model that is used to identify the frequencies sensitive to temperature and thickness changes. The group velocity of the corresponding frequency components is determined and their corresponding changes with respect to temperature for different thickness are analytically modeled. TAP-NDE is then used to perform an experimental analysis on Silicon wafers of different thickness to determine the maximum possible resolution of TAP-NDE towards temperature sensitivity, and to demonstrate the ability to differentiate between wafers of different deposition layer thickness at temperatures up to 600?C. Temperature resolution is demonstrated for ?10?C resolution and for ?5?C resolution; while thickness differentiation is carried out with wafers carrying 4000? and 8000? of aluminum deposition layer. The experimental group velocities of a set of selected frequency components extracted using the Gabor Wavelet time-frequency analysis as compared to their corresponding theoretical group velocities show satisfactory agreement. As a result of this work, it is seen that TAP-NDE is a suitable tool to identify and characterize thickness and temperature changes simultaneously during thermal annealing that can replace the current need for separate characterization of these two important parameters in semiconductor manufacturing.