Israeli PRs

Nova (Nasdaq: NVMI) announced today its metrology portfolio for advanced gate-all-around (GAA). To enhance its market-leading portfolio, the Company is unveiling multiple advanced solutions uniquely equipped to address the manufacturing challenges of next-generation logic devices.

As the semiconductors industry transitions toward advanced technology nodes, process challenges increase dramatically. Time to yield becomes a critical parameter, conflicting with an increasing number of process steps, higher sampling and design rule shrinkage. This clash is further complicated by the need to measure on-device and in-die, as the test structures are no longer representative of the actual process. Moreover, an abundance of new materials necessitates inline control of parameters, such as thickness, composition, stress, and local variations within the device. To address these needs, process control solutions must be more accurate and applicable for complex 3D structures and new materials, applied to more layers and utilized to more physical and chemical inline parameters.

In logic manufacturing, the most significant transition is from fin field-effect transistor (FinFET) to gate-all-around transistor (GAA), which complicates the fabrication process. Nanosheet transistors set new constraints, dictating a complete characterization of multiple individual nanosheets for dimensional and material properties. Multiple nanosheet critical steps, such as inner spacer formation and replacement metal gate formation, require much tighter process control.

“Nova’s rich and differentiated portfolio is built to meet the challenges of next-generation device fabrication,” said Eitan Oppenhaim, President and CEO. “On top of the challenging design, materials are becoming an increasingly crucial key to device evolution, and our elevated investment in this domain provides our customers with a unique complementary value. This is further enhanced by the synergy between our market-leading dimensional metrology, ground-breaking materials metrology portfolio, and the recent addition of chemical metrology.”

Nova’s complementary offering allows customers to get a better insight into the most complicated semiconductor structures through a wider view on geometrical dimensions, physical materials properties and chemical analytics. The overall solution has already been rolled out to the market and is in use by leading customers to stabilize the GAA process steps and increase yield.

Nova’s rich next-generation portfolio includes:

Nova PRISM enables superior metrology performance in critical applications, enabled by the platform’s spectral interferometry (SI) technology. SI technology was proven to add an entirely new dimension of spectral information inaccessible to current traditional optical CD methods by providing absolute phase information that improves sensitivity to weak target parameters, specifically required by the complexity introduced in the new GAA design rules.

Nova i570 is Nova’s top performance integrated metrology platform for high-volume manufacturing, cementing Nova’s leadership in this domain. The platform improves total inline measurement capabilities in small structures and multiple layers.

Nova METRION® brings SIMS technology to high-volume manufacturing, enabling depth profiles of the materials composition, previously limited to a lab environment, in the critical step of material deposition in nanosheets manufacturing. Manufacturers must tightly control materials’ concentration and uniform deposition on individual nanosheets.

Nova ELIPSON™ utilizes advanced Raman spectroscopy technology for optical materials metrology (OMM) to extract materials properties of in-die structures by fast and non-destructive means. ELIPSON™ provides multiple solutions for next-generation production challenges, including strain formation and defectivity measurements through the process.

Nova VERAFLEX® IV is the latest industry standard for in-line and in-die X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) with integrated X-ray fluorescence (XRF). VERAFLEX® IV delivers direct measurement control over mono-layer film stacks and dopant concentrations by generating the industry’s highest X-ray flux and proprietary optical system necessary to address complex structures.

All platforms are unified by Nova’s machine learning software suite, Nova FIT 2.0, the Company’s newest machine learning solution, powered by advanced algorithms and a state-of-the-art computational layer.