What is it about?
This paper describes how reticles are affected by exposure to electric fields, and identifies faults in standard reticle handling practice that can be rectified quite easily to improve protection against electrostatic damage.
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Why is it important?
This paper is important because it identifies errors made in the methodology for reticle electrostatic protection. Two major errors are; the use of equipotential bonding, which increases risk rather than reducing it; and using static dissipative plastic for the manufacture of reticle pods and boxes. This material acts as a high-pass filter for electric field, and also doubles the frequency of hazardous field exposures at the low frequency regime which is where fields are generated by handling.
Perspectives
My perspective is that the semiconductor industry is blind to the mistakes it has made over electrostatic protection and is reluctant to correct its mistakes, preferring to pass the cost of those mistakes onto its customers rather than rectifying them. The cost of these mistakes possibly runs to many millions of dollars a year in large facilities, and it could even extend to billions of dollars of losses each year worldwide - nobody knows, because statistics on reticle electrostatic damage are no longer being collected. these mistakes are easy to correct - as described in SEMI Standard E163.
Dr Gavin C Rider
Read the Original
This page is a summary of:
Electrostatic risks to reticles and damage prevention methodology
, March 2016, SPIE,
DOI: 10.1117/12.2218360.
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