Guest Editorial Special Section on the Advanced Semiconductor Manufacturing Conference

This special section of the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON Semiconductor Manufacturing (TSM) provides a wider dissemination of selected material presented at the 2010 ASMC to the semiconductor manufacturing community. One paper discusses the structural and electrical characterization of ALD-deposited high-k films. Defects are studied in three papers from different perspectives; one focuses on a library of different types of defects, the second studies failure rate estimation of each process layer using critical area analysis and failing bit results, while the third reduces the electrostatically adhered particles on wafer backside by using ionizers. Lithography applications are discussed in one paper, where bright field defect inspection is employed for process window centering at the 22 nm node, and in another where topcoat-less resists are evaluated for high volume immersion lithography. One paper details the neural networks for advanced process control while another investigates yield improvement using a scalable parametric measurement macro. Finally, rule induction for identifying multilayer tool commonalities is evaluated.