Advanced Manufacturing and Material Measurements Software Tool Weave ™ for the Acceleration and Automation of SEM Image Analysis in the Semiconductor Industry

In this Phase I SBIR proposal, SandBox Semiconductor™ proposes to develop an Advanced Manufacturing and Material Measurements software tool called Weave ™ for accelerating and automating SEM image analysis for the semiconductor industry. During the development of a new manufacturing process line for a semiconductor device, tens of thousands of scanning electron microscopy (SEM) images are taken and measured as feedback to test and optimize the hundreds of processes required to fabricate a given device design. Measurements of critical dimensions (“CDs”) are extracted from these images, for example the top and bottom widths and depths of trenches. Weave ™ will automate the extraction of the CDs from a single or stitched image. This automation will improve accuracy and reduce measurement variability by avoiding human bias, improving data standardization for SEM processing, and accelerating and reducing the cost of process development. The proposed work will leverage innovations in image processing from NIST’s Image Analytics Program as well as SandBox Semiconductor’s process modeling and prediction suite, SandBox Studio™.