ReVera Announces New Inline Thin Film Metrology System

ReVera, the leader in advanced film thickness and composition metrology, announces a new production metrology system for complex film process control. The VeraFlex III XF combines enhanced X-Ray Photoelectron Spectroscopy (XPS) with a unique low energy X-ray Fluorescence (LE-XRF) channel to address the difficult metrology challenges of 20nm High-K Metal Gate (HKMG) transistor logic processes and FinFET R&D and manufacturing.

The VeraFlex III XF has successfully concluded its customer beta program and has been sold to multiple customers. This product is the third generation of the very successful VeraFlex series of XPS production systems that were the first to bring thin film materials metrology to the production floor. ReVera’s customers will benefit from higher productivity from higher throughput, more process sensitivity from significantly higher signal-to-noise, better investment leverage from broader applications coverage, and more availability from 33% improvement in scheduled preventative maintenance. Additionally, the VeraFlex III XF will integrate seamlessly into the existing fleet of VeraFlex II production metrology systems as well as the QED offline recipe and data analysis systems.

The unique dual-channel XPS and LE-XRF use a single stable X-ray source to simultaneously stimulate both XPS and LE-XRF data. Combining XPS surface sensitivity with LE-XRF deep composition capture range expands ReVera’s inline applications coverage to more complex and thicker HKMG stacks, thicker films, copper interconnect processes such as Co and Mn, and buried thin films.

“The VeraFlex III XF delivers the technology and productivity enhancements our customers need to ramp 20nm HKMG yields and to accelerate FinFET R&D and ramp into manufacturing,” noted Tom Larson, Vice President of Marketing at ReVera. "VeraFlex III XF customers are already benefiting from new, inline metrology solutions for HKMG applications on FinFET structures, an urgent need that is largely unaddressed by conventional optical and X-ray metrology tools. We are excited by the continued growth of our products as our customers’ complex processes challenge them to find more robust process control solutions at atomic scales.”