Media
Contact:
Collier
Smith (Boulder), (303) 497-3198
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World Wide Web
NIST Offers Online
Metrology Resource for Electronics Manufacturers
Semiconductor,
electronics and data storage device manufacturers can use a new NIST
web page to easily find the NIST research, products and services of
greatest relevance to their industry. The NIST semiconductor/electronics
industry-sector web page (www.nist.gov/public_affairs/semiconductor.htm)
is designed to help industrial R&D departments and manufacturing
operations find the most accurate measurements, standards, calibrations
and data available from NIST. Links to NIST cooperative research and
funding opportunities also are offered.
The semiconductor/electronics
web page gives very short descriptions of what NIST does to help build
better microchips, from more accurately measuring step heights, dielectric
films and interconnects to ways to improve manufacturing processes.
Along with the brief project descriptions, the page offers links to
more detailed descriptions of each project or program, as well as
contact names, e-mail addresses and phone numbers.
The page is one
of several new industry-sector web pages intended to improve industry
awareness of NIST products, services and programs. Go to “Information
for Industry” on the NIST home page (www.nist.gov)
to access the index for all of the NIST industry-sector web pages.
Media
Contact:
Linda
Joy, (301) 975-4403
Quality
Using Baldrige
Criteria as Tool to Hire, Keep Top Employees
For
more than 14 years, organizations have used the Malcolm Baldrige Criteria
for Performance Excellence as a tool to help identify strengths and
target opportunities for improving processes and results, including
recruiting, hiring and keeping valuable employees. “The Baldrige
criteria emphasize the value of employees as an integral part of the
company’s success,” says Dale Crownover, CEO of Texas Nameplate
Co., a 1998 winner of the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award.
To help evaluate
workforce processes, the criteria ask questions such as, “How
do you motivate employees to develop and utilize their full potential?”
“How do you accomplish effective succession planning for senior
leadership and throughout the organization?” “How do education
and training contribute to the achievement of your action plans?”
“How do you deliver education and training?”
Baldrige award-winning
companies know that employees are key to their success. “We are
committed to doing all we can to recruit exactly the right people
and provide the right work environment to keep them,” says Joe
Sober, vice president and general manager of Dana Corp. Spicer Driveshaft
Division, a 2000 Baldrige Award recipient. At Spicer, employees are
encouraged to improve their skills, take control of their careers
and move up in the company. “In my 23 years with Dana, I have
never gone outside to fill a management position,” says Sober.
For more information
on how Baldrige Award winners use the Baldrige performance excellence
criteria to hire and keep employees, see the Summer 2001 CEO Issue
Sheet, “Baldrige: For Hiring and Keeping the Best Employees,”
at www.quality.nist.gov/CEO_Issue_Sheet_HR.htm
or call (301) 975-2036.
Media
Contact:
Jan
Kosko, (301) 975-2767
Manufacturing
New Reference
Material Simplifies SEM Performance Checks
The
use of a new “sharpness” reference material from NIST combined
with data from state-of-the-art inspection software could help make
routine the currently difficult but critical task of running performance
checks on scanning electron microscopes, known as SEMs.
All SEMs, whether
they are in the laboratory or on the production line, slowly lose
performance ability with use. Loss in image quality also means loss
in measurement sensitivity. Contributing to SEM performance loss are
a variety of factors including misalignment, contamination and increase
in size of the primary electron beam. Measuring the loss in image
sharpness is one way to identify this performance.
An improved ability
to assess SEM performance loss would be an important quality control
advance for the more than $200 billion semiconductor industry because
fully automated SEMs are used to inspect silicon wafers.
NIST Reference
Material 8091 is a small (approximately 2-square-millimeter) diced
semiconductor chip with tiny tower-shaped structures of silicon generated
by a plasma-etching artifact commonly referred to as “grass.”
The fine-grained “towers” can be used to determine image
sharpness at magnifications in excess of 100,000 times at both high-
and low-accelerating voltages.
RM 8091 can be
mounted onto a wafer, wafer piece or specimen stub for insertion into
a laboratory SEM or wafer inspection SEM. The chip also can be mounted
onto a “drop-in” wafer. It is designed for use with Fourier
analysis software such as the NIST/SPECTEL SEM Monitor Program, the
NIST Kurtosis program, the University of Tennessee SMART program,
or similar analytical techniques.
The SEM Monitor
is a collaborative effort by NIST, Hewlett-Packard, and SPECTEL Co.
of Mountain View, Calif. The SEM Monitor was honored in 1998 with
an R&D 100 award from Research and Development Magazine.
The system can make sharpness measurements on static, collected images
or in real-time live mode, thus enabling users to easily adjust and
align a CD-SEM or laboratory microscope to optimize performance.
RM 8091 is available
from the NIST Standard Reference Materials Program. Purchases of RM
8091 can be made by calling (301) 975-6776. RM 8091 also can be ordered
online at www.nist.gov/srm.
For technical information, contact Michael
Postek, (301) 975-2299.
Media
Contact:
John
Blair, (301) 975-4261
Technology
Collaboration
ATP Partners
Putting a Spring in Their Steppers
Tiny,
near-microscopic springs created using semiconductor lithography techniques
are poised to enter the marketplace, offering chip designers dramatic
improvements in chip-to-package connections and chip testing capabilities.
Working with support from the NIST Advanced Technology Program, a
consortium made up of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (Palo Alto,
Calif.); NanoNexus Inc. (Fremont, Calif.); and the Georgia Institute
of Technology (Atlanta) is developing micro-spring technology for
high-density, integrated circuit test probes and chip packaging.
The micro-spring
technology was invented in 1994 at PARC. The springs are batch-fabricated
on silicon wafers using a MEMS technique. Narrow thin-film metal fingers—with
pitches (spacing from center to center) as fine as 6 micrometers—are
laid down over a substrate using conventional lithography. By careful
control of the metal deposition process, researchers build in mechanical
stress between the top and bottom of the metal strip. When the substrate
is partially etched away, the stress causes one end of the ribbon
to curl up away from the surface, forming a tiny spring contact.
The technique
makes possible very dense chip-to-package connections—10 times
denser than today’s best solder connections. This is important
because as lithography advances allow ever more complex chips with
smaller and smaller features, the problem of connecting the chip to
the outside world gets harder and harder. Conventional soldered connections
are reaching their limit. But micro-spring contacts are potentially
a generation or more ahead, say the researchers. The springiness of
the springs also means that they absorb the mechanical strains set
up in coupling chips to substrates with a different thermal expansion
factor. And, unlike solder, they’re lead-free.
NanoNexus, a small
start-up, is developing the technology as “NanoSprings™”
for chip and wafer test probes, because the novel contacts easily
can scale to meet shrinking size and precision requirements that can
not be achieved with any other technology, and do it economically.
The company recently demonstrated the ability to test contacts to
gold bumps at a 52-micrometer pitch—typical of the contacts for
display-driver chips in cell phones—and is pushing the technology
to pitches as low as 35 micrometers and other metals.
For more information
on the ATP project, contact Purabi
Mazumdar, (301) 975-4981.
For more on the
ATP, go to www.atp.nist.gov.
Media
Contact:
Michael
Baum, (301) 975-2763
