Ben Tsai: Inspection and Metrology to Support the Quest for Perfection: Photolithography for the Sub-10nm Nodes

In order to successfully realize the sub-10nm lithography roadmap, photolithographers and equipment and materials suppliers must work in close collaboration to mitigate yield-limiting defects and process variations in order to raise device yields and ensure robust progress in innovation. For more than 40 years, inspection and metrology equipment suppliers have led the semiconductor industry with innovative breakthroughs in process control; developing inspection and metrology solutions that address key lithography challenges.

In this plenary presentation, Ben Tsai, Chief Technology Officer and Executive Vice President of Corporate Alliances at KLA-Tencor, outlines the process control challenges that lay ahead, highlights examples of technology innovations and those that are under development that will support the ecosystem of innovation and collaboration to help realize the sub-10nm lithography roadmap.

Looking toward EUV lithography inspection, Tsai points out that incoming shape and stress variations including lot-to-lot, and wafer-to-wafer can be improved with feedback to producers at the prior step to adjust processes, while also feeding forward the detected errors, which is one of the ways inspection tools pay for themselves through process improvement.

Ben (Bin-Ming) Tsai has been the Chief Technical Officer and Executive Vice President of Corporate Alliances at KLA-Tencor Corporation since October 2006. Tsai has more than 23 years of semiconductor industry experience and deep insights into future trends in semiconductor technology.

He started his career at KLA Instruments in 1984 and held a variety of management positions. He served as Group Vice President and Chief Technical Officer of Systems of KLA-Tencor from 2000 to 2004 and was responsible for some of its key technology alliances for optics and sensors. He also served as General Manager for the Wafer Inspection Division at KLA-Tencor.

Tsai received a Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering from the National Taiwan University and a Master's and a PhD in Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Dr. Tsai has also completed Executive Business Administration courses at the Stanford Executive Institute and the Japanese Efficiency Institute in Tokyo. He has been granted more than 30 patents.