The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document.
The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge covers the following: Patent number, Date patent was issued, Date patent was filed, Title of the patent, Applicant, Inventor, Assignee, Attorney firm, Primary examiner, Assistant examiner, CPCs, and Abstract. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document (in Adobe Acrobat format, aka pdf). To download or print any patent click here.
Patent No.:
Date of Patent:
Dec. 09, 2014
Filed:
Dec. 23, 2013
Intermolecular, Inc., San Jose, CA (US);
Khaled Ahmed, Anaheim, CA (US);
Frank Greer, Pasadena, CA (US);
George Mirth, Saratoga, CA (US);
Zhi-Wen Sun, Sunnyvale, CA (US);
Intermolecular, Inc., San Jose, CA (US);
Abstract
Provided are methods of high productivity combinatorial (HPC) inspection of semiconductor substrates. A substrate includes two layers of dissimilar materials interfacing each other, such as a stack of a silicon bottom layer and an indium gallium arsenide top layer. The dissimilar materials have one or more of thermal, structural, and lattice mismatches. As a part of the inspection, the top layer is etched in a combinatorial manner. Specifically, the top layer is divided into multiple different site-isolated regions. One such region may be etched using different process conditions from another region. Specifically, etching temperature, etching duration and/or etchant composition may vary among the site-isolated regions. After combinatorial etching, each region is inspected to determine its etch-pit density (EPD) value. These values may be then analyzed to determine an overall EPD value for the substrate, which may involve discarding EPD values for over-etched and under-etched regions.