PHOTOS COURTESY OF APPLIED MATERIALS

Semiconductor equipment giant Applied Materials opened its Process Module Technology Center in Sunnyvale, CA, in late March. The 166,000-sq-ft facility includes 39,000 sq ft of ISO Class 3 cleanroom space and capacity for more than 300 separate process and support tools. The new center joins Applied's existing process technology facility, the Equipment & Process Integration Center (EPIC), which the company opened in November 1998.

"Closely simulating customers' fab environments, this facility allows us to better understand their challenges and work hand-in-hand to provide the most effective and optimized solutions possible," notes company president Dan Maydan. "Customers will be able to work side by side with Applied Materials' technologists to develop and qualify next-generation chips and manufacturing processes," such as "low- and high-k dielectrics, copper interconnects, and smaller, faster transistor designs."

The center is designed to be "more flexible than a regular fab," allowing for tools to be moved around and lines reconfigured, depending on ever-changing process integration and tool development requirements, explains Joseph Nardini, the plant's operations manager. An example of such flexibility, he says, is that each process bay has a set of valve manifold boxes (VMBs) capable of handling all classifications of gases.

One of the biggest challenges facing the center is "managing the movement of materials," such aswafers, tool parts, and other supplies, according to Nardini. He points out that the automated material handling system, which can store some 70,000 process module and demo wafers, makes wafer logistics easier. To avoid cross contamination and misprocessing, a color-coding scheme to separate copper- and noncopper-treated wafers, similar to those used in fabs at Texas Instruments and other chipmakers, is being instituted in the facility, Nardini adds.

A key toolset is a full DUV lithography cell, equipped with a Canon ES3 scanner and FSI P3500 track (shown above) that can enable 248- and 193-nm lithography for device geometries down to 70 nm. Applied's full line of advanced process and inspection equipment will be deployed at the center, including the Producer SE PECVD tool pictured at left.