E-Beam inspection: best practices for copper logic and foundry fabs

Monitoring and eliminating buried electrical defects has become critical for 130 nm Cu devices and below. As a result, electron-beam inspection is being widely adopted for both engineering analysis and production line monitoring. In this paper we describe current implementation of e-beam inspection technology for copper logic and foundry fabs. These best practices are then applied to a hypothetical 20,000 WSPM 300 mm fab, taking into account documented case studies, a bench-marking survey of worldwide e-beam inspection utilization, and new advances in e-beam inspection technology.