Onto Innovation Inc. today announced the availability of the Element material analysis platform, which enables customers to monitor and control layers of dielectric thin films, measuring dopants such as boron and phosphorous, as well as monitoring process by-products such as hydrogen. The Element platform was selected by one of the top three memory manufacturers for production monitoring of their advanced devices. Onto Innovation received multiple orders from several of their sites and began first deliveries in the second quarter of 2020.
“With the adoption of the Element platform for these new applications, we are moving beyond our existing served available market (SAM) of measuring impurities and epitaxial thickness for the bare silicon wafer market. We believe the inline production monitoring of thin film dielectrics will increase our 2021 SAM by approximately $30 million,” said Robert Fiordalice, vice president and general manager of the Wafer Business Unit. “Our customers are benefiting from our product output, allowing them to correlate materials characteristics to integration variables like etch selectivity and ultimately parametric yield. We believe the initial orders for the Element FTIR technology indicate a trend for in-line monitoring of materials as the number of dielectrics, and semiconductor materials used in chips is expected to increase exponentially for advanced nodes. Our customer roadmaps indicate a 10X growth in materials monitoring over the next five years.”
“Advanced memory nodes require accurate and stable process control,” said Anoop Somanchi, senior director of product marketing. “Onto Innovation’s new Element FTIR system was selected after a thorough competitive evaluation. This technology, paired with best in class analysis algorithms, captured yield impacting process variation for the customer’s most challenging memory products.”