In low-temperature (300–350 °C) silicon epitaxy employing low-energy inert-gas ion bombardment on a growing film surface, the effects of ion bombardment energy and ion flux as well as that of ion species on the crystallinity of a grown silicon film have been experimentally investigated. It is shown that the energy dose determined by the product of ion energy and ion flux is a main factor for epitaxy that compensates for the reduction in the substrate temperature. Large-mass, large-radius ion bombardment using Xe has been demonstrated to be more effective in promoting epitaxy at low substrate temperatures than Ar ion bombardment. Thus, low-energy, high-flux, large-mass ion bombardment is the direction to pursue for further reducing the processing temperature while preserving high crystallinity of grown films.

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In this paper, a new methodology for effective process excursion monitoring using defect review/classification information is proposed. We introduce a new defect classification scheme, in which relevant defect types that are likely to be caused by the same mechanism or source are grouped into a "defect family." It is demonstrated that trending by the defect family drastically improves the detection efficiency of killer defect excursion by reducing or eliminating noise resulting from irrelevant benign defects. We compare the risks of missing critical excursions for monitoring by total defect count, killer defect count, and killer defect family, and illustrate the effectiveness of our methodology using data from actual fabline.

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In this paper, new methodologies for effective process excursion monitoring and defect source isolation are proposed. We introduce new defect classification scheme, in which relevant defect types that are likely to be caused by the same mechanism or source are grouped into a "defect family." We demonstrate that trending by the defect family drastically improves the excursion detection efficiency without suffering noise from irrelevant benign defects. Furthermore we have developed a methodology for identifying the source of the excursion using defect type Pareto. This is based on the fact that the signature of defect type Pareto leads to the defect source information and thus possibly indicates the origin of the problem. Thus both process control and excursion source identification can be achieved simultaneously by effective defect classification.