Revolutionary Lithography & Patterning Optimization – World leading on-product performance by smart software & consulting.
Compatible to all Tool Vendors – The only optimization solution for lithography tools from all vendors.
Time & Cost Effective – Proven success: reduced time-to-market, increased throughput & yield.
Cutting Edge Technology – Smartest processing of data in manufacturing – more than you expect.
Strategic Partner – We accept your challenges now and in future with continuous improvements.
Lithography & patterning are facing a lot of challenges to achieve high process yield, productivity, and low cost, due to smaller feature sizes, new materials and designs:
- Process optimization for ramping products is very time-consuming.
- Multiple patterning requires new paradigms for handling complexity.
- Metrology measurement effort has increased, resulting in lower tool throughput.
- Exposure tool calibration & matching needs to be done more often, impacting productive time.
- Run-to-run (APC) complexity has increased, often leading to suboptimal process control settings.
- Troubleshooting problems consumes a lot of manpower and tool time.
Equipment software (tool calibration & optimization) and generic process automation (APC, SPC, FDC) alone are insufficient to overcome these challenges, as both types of software do not sufficiently address on-product process optimization.
The OVALiS software suite by Qoniac is the only solution targeting all aspects required to solve this process optimization gap. OVALiS uses one database to combine measurement data with context information from different types of equipment, as well as mass context information from fab automation. As a result, OVALiS provides – in a very efficient way – the four aspects needed today for on-product performance improvement: optimization by simulation, diagnostics, monitoring, and next-level process control.
Conquering the sheer complexity of optimizing different exposure, metrology, and APC settings is not trivial and requires an increasing number of experiments. OVALiS solves this complexity problem by replacing the time-consuming and expensive experiments with fast and statistically more relevant simulations. Furthermore, finding process optimization potential, as well as detecting and solving process excursions are becoming increasingly difficult. OVALiS is tackling these challenges with superefficient diagnostic capabilities.
With ever-tighter overlay, CD, and focus specs, advanced inline monitoring is key for automatically detecting excursions and for enabling predictive maintenance.
In addition, tracking the quality of reference corrections and CPE corrections is extremely important in order to understand when those corrections have to be updated or to identify when these said corrections cause process problems.
Last but not least, today’s challenges in lithography and patterning require a next level of process control. This includes dynamic CPE corrections that can be updated for every lot, more ways of feed-forward control, indirect overlay calculations, smart sampling of metrology wafers and marks, and the inclusion of distortion measurements.
OVALiS delivers all four quadrants of on-product performance improvements, resulting in:
- Increased process yield and time to market (faster ramping) through on-product overlay improvements with better and faster process stability.
- Increased metrology and/or scanner throughput due to the optimization of the sampling schemes.
- Reduced tool downtimes, experiments, manpower, and material through the elimination of time-consuming experiments to find optimal settings and through a much faster detection and root-cause analysis of process excursions.
The OVALiS software suite consists of different product modules that can be bought separately to cater to the needs of different customers. The product modules can enhance each other, for example, the visualization of CD data together with leveling, alignment, and overlay data in a case where all diagnostic modules are used together.
OVALiS can be used without interacting with fab automation, but the output of the monitoring modules is typically forwarded to SPC, FDC, or yield management systems. The results of OVALiS’ next-level process control are of course an input for fab automation, as they can be regarded as an add-on to an APC system. However, the effort to integrate this functionality is in practice very small, making the addition of OVALiS in a fab environment is extremely easy.
Every customer has his own agenda and use cases. Service means to us, serving our customer. To enable the full potential of our OVALiS software solution and to maximize the customer benefits according to his goals, we accompany each customer with smart consulting. Our experienced process engineers will provide on-site application support on a regular base to raise the on-product optimization to the next level of process control. In several countries we have local engineers supporting customers in their daily business.
To ensure the stability and a seamless implementation of OVALiS in the productive environment our IT experts will provide consistent IT-Support. Starting from the first installation and integration into the customer infrastructure and continuing with regular maintenance and updates. This can be handled on-site and via remote access.
We want to meet the individual needs of our customers. Our motivated software development team is structured in a highly agile way, to be able to deliver urgent customer requested features in short term.
