Screening SIMOX for VLSI and ULSI chip production

Thin film SOI technology has gained significant interest recently due to its potential application for ultra high density low power and radiation resistant electronics. Although significant progress has been made in reducing SIMOX defect density, the defects in SIMOX wafers are still important yield inhibitors to VLSI and ULSI circuits. Currently we are manufacturing large density SOI ASIC (400K usable gates) chips and 1M SOI SRAM chips including large 20 chip MCMs using SIMOX (BOX thickness ≈380 nm). In this paper we describe our screening methods to achieve VLSI and ULSI circuit production with reasonable yield