SIMAX engineers, with 20+ year experience, are some of the industries' best at helping your team of engineers design and implement alignment targets that guarantee the best target acquisition. This in turn ensures alignment precision that ultimately leads to the overlay accuracy, which is needed for your innovative products. Our engineers will train your team to utilize the Simax "Overlay Plus" package to deliver the best alignment and overlay performance possible.

One of the photolithography engineer's main challenges is the fabrication of alignment markers that function successfully under a wide range of process variation. Process variations impacting an automatic alignment system's ability to consistently detect the alignment markers include: thin film thickness, etch depth, surface texture, and photoresist coating thickness. 

Utilization of Software and Hardware

The "Overlay Plus" engineering tools provide the photolithography engineer with the ability to completely characterize the entire photolithography system with real product layouts, both in resist and on-production lots.

The "Overlay Plus" Application Package

• A combination of specialized software and hardware
• Engineering data analysis software
• Data modeling across multiple lithography platforms
• Onsite Simax Applications Engineering support for training and start up
• Includes e-mail and telephone Application Engineering support
• Customized reticles to enable matching to any photolithography system, e.g., 1X, 4X, 5X steppers, 4X scanners, contact printers
• Concentric and non-concentric matching
• System ranking and optimized grouping by product overlay requirements

Benefits

• Reduced production reworks
• Early warning of system problems
• Improved fab utilization
• Improved overlay Cp and CpK performance
• SPC improvement, less lots on hold for engineering disposition

Noise Effects of CMP