Development of automatic recipe creation system for exposure tools

In the System-on-Chip (SoC) market, customers increasingly demand short-term deliveries. One of the many factors that can delay development turn-around-time (TAT) is "Recipe Creation Delay and Error". A recipe must be prepared without delay in readiness for lot release. Moreover, once a recipe creation error occurs, it leads to the stopping of the production process. In the worst case, lots may have to be scrapped. As a result, the error may entail a huge opportunity loss. In particular, since a recipe for exposure tools requires many parameters, the recipe must be managed properly. Therefore, we developed an automatic recipe creation system for exposure tools. The system creates a recipe with "intermediate format" that is defined by abstraction of recipe parameters and does not depend on tool types. Consequently, we confirmed that the system reduced the TAT and the number of man-hours required for a recipe creation.