High Sensitivity Accelerometers for Monitoring Semiconductor Manufacturing

Semiconductor manufacturing procedures are extremely complex and evolve rapidly and continually. As semiconductors continue to shrink while expanding their capabilities it becomes more challenging to avoid manufacturing errors at the nanometer scale. Also, increased throughput demands leads to faster machinery movement and therefore higher vibrations. Vibrations, whether in a manufacturing or inspection machine, can corrupt the patterns being deposited on the semiconductors, leading to circuit failures in the finished parts. The vibrations which can cause manufacturing errors, however, are miniscule, in the millionths of g's. The patterns on a chip layer are measured in the tens of nanometers. Traditional accelerometers used for common vibration monitoring simply won't measure the tiny deflections necessary to monitor how well a chip is being made. Fortunately, high sensitivity accelerometers commonly used to measure seismic low frequency vibrations can measure deflections at the nanometer scale. In this white paper we'll explain how those accelerometers work and show some simple specifications to demonstrate their ability to measure at the scales necessary to monitor semiconductor manufacturing and inspection.