|
PRESS RELEASES
 Back
September 29, 2004
Scott eliminates “mystery” dopant woes at
IC Fabs with new high-accuracy diborane mixtures
Plumsteadville, PA—The Semiconductor and Electronics Applications Division of Scott Specialty Gases has recently introduced a new family of certified diborane (B2H6) mixtures that provide ±2% analytical accuracy and retain ±2% stability for 12 months. The new dopant mixture suite is part of Scott’s Omega Class products engineered expressly for semiconductor and electronics manufacturing applications.
The Problem: Use of diborane mixtures is the most common method of introducing boron in the production of integrated circuits. Diborane mixtures, however, have long been notoriously unstable and variable in composition, so much so that gas suppliers could not accurately certify the actual mixture concentration of a cylinder once it had been prepared. By the time a fab received and used the mixture in their doping process, the true diborane concentration would have changed, often drastically. This would lead to uncontrolled boron doping in the layer being deposited, which in turn changed the electrical properties of the device being manufactured.
Since a fab typically had no dependable way of assessing the gas mixture’s actual concentration, it would not know precisely how much dopant had actually been deposited until they tested their end product. Some fabs resorted to adjusting process flows around the empirically determined concentration of a new diborane mixture. This tuning process often caused extensive downtime, sometimes lasting days or even weeks, and invariably resulted in expensive loss of raw materials as well as end product. Making matters worse, each time a fab changed out a cylinder of diborane, it would need to repeat the tuning process.
Scott’s Solution: New Omega Class Diborane mixtures can be prepared in concentration ranges from 20 ppm to 5 percent with certified ±2% accuracy. A suite of traceable, independently certified reference standards have been developed by Scott to support the analysis of these products. Each mixture is guaranteed to remain stable to within ±2% for a minimum of 12 months. In addition, Omega Class Diborane mixtures exhibit reliable reproducibility so that cylinder-to-cylinder variability is minimal. Each mixture ordered at a particular concentration will be virtually identical to the one before it. The high degree of accuracy of Omega Class Diborane mixtures, combined with their traceability and dependable reproducibility, eliminates the need for trial-and-error tuning previously associated with the boron doping process. Expensive downtime and loss of end product is therefore eliminated as well. For more information about Omega Class Diborane mixtures, call 800-21-SCOTT toll-free. Or, request a FREE 80-page catalog of pure and mixed gases as well as delivery equipment for semiconductor and electronics applications now, or call 1-866-704-6513.
|