The new Lean Etch, from Intevac Inc., was introduced last week during SEMICON West 2007. The new tool applies lean techniques to help address the limitation of cluster tools, said Intevac.
"Cluster tools are wasteful of space within the fab, are prone to throughput bottlenecks, must be shut down during maintenance and are hard to service because of poor access to the process chambers and wafer handling platform. Addressing every one of these issues is a revolutionary step toward driving down the cost of semiconductor manufacturing," said Kevin Fairbairn, CEO Intevac.
The Lean mainframe can enable 200 wafers per hour throughput and can support up to up to six independent process chambers. It also has universal etch capability -- extendible from Dielectric Etch today to Silicon and Metal Etch in the future -- for both critical and non-critical applications.
"From the very beginning, our talented team designed Lean Etch to address the most pressing needs of our customers, which are to etch ever-shrinking features with continually tighter Critical Dimension control parameters, while at the same time achieving significantly enhanced productivity relative to the legacy tools in the market today," commented Fairbairn.
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