Phase transitions, curve evolution, and the control of semiconductor manufacturing processes

©1996 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or distribution to servers or lists, or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works must be obtained from the IEEE. This material is presented to ensure timely dissemination of scholarly and technical work. Copyright and all rights therein are retained by authors or by other copyright holders. All persons copying this information are expected to adhere to the terms and constraints invoked by each author's copyright. In most cases, these works may not be reposted without the explicit permission of the copyright holder.Presented at the 35th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control, 11-13 Dec 1996, Kobe, JapanDOI: 10.1109/CDC.1996.573677This paper presents a strategy for the estimation and control of certain semiconductor manufacturing processes, employing models developed to describe the dynamics of material interfaces in phase transition problems. Previous work has successfully applied similar models to predict surface evolution in etching and deposition. Here, we propose to adapt these techniques to real-time process monitoring and control. The testbed for algorithm development is a highly simplified model of a plasma etch. Key elements of the scheme are investigated, and found to be feasible