What is it about?
Many people think that protecting reticles from electrostatic damage is no different from protecting semiconductor devices from ESD damage during their manufacture. This is a false presumption, and applying some of the countermeasures taken to reduce the risk of damage to manufactured devices can actually increase the risk of damage to a reticle! This paper explains this, and shows that the electrostatic risk is everywhere. Common misperceptions about reticle protection are explained and technically correct procedures that should be used to protect reticles are described.
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Why is it important?
Reticles are essential elements for semiconductor production - they are the "master" blueprint that is replicated in the manufacturing process to create a working semiconductor device. Therefore, if any part of the reticle is damaged it will create a defect that will be repeated in every device printed from that reticle. Whether this causes the device to fail at final test or merely introduces a parametric deviation in device operation, such avoidable damage is serious - it can cost anything up to over a million dollars in lost production (actual case) if a reticle is damaged in this way. So understanding the risk and knowing how to correctly avoid it is important.
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Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Electrostatic risk to reticles in the nanolithography era, Journal of Micro/Nanolithography MEMS and MOEMS, April 2016, SPIE,
DOI: 10.1117/1.jmm.15.2.023501.
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