SAN JOSE — KLA-Tencor Corp. announced late Thursday that it has acquired Fab Solutions, a leading provider of advanced process control (APC) software solutions for semiconductor manufacturing. No financial details were disclosed.
Fab Solutions, a division of ObjectSpace in Austin, Tex., is KLA-Tencor's third software company acquisition in the past few months. Earlier, it purchased Finle Technologies Inc., a provider of lithography modeling and data analysis software, and ACME, a yield-correlation software firm in Taiwan.
Fab Solutions will become a key component in KLA-Tencor's PMC-Net yield information management network, which enables yield and process engineers to respond to the major yield-impacting parametric data in a fab in near-real time.
“Since we first began developing PMC-Net, we envisioned an integral software component that would help maintain process tool parameters near their optimal settings and avoid misprocessing,” said Gary Dickerson, chief operating officer for KLA-Tencor.
Fab Solutions' Catalyst provides a scalable open architecture supporting fab-wide run-to-run process control and fault detection, he said. When integrated into PMC-Net, Catalyst will enable the correlation of real-time, in-situ data from a given process tool with in-line defect, metrology, work in process (WIP) and end-of-line wafer sort data already obtained by PMC-Net.
“As a result, virtually every major manufacturing data source in a fab can be correlated into actionable data,” said Dickerson, “vastly improving the identification of the key process parameters that adversely affect yield, or that can be tuned to increase device value.”
Catalyst then allows chip makers to build control models for those parameters, which automatically make adjustments to the process tool recipe based on subsequent metrology measurements. These capabilities help to tighten process windows, improve overall equipment effectiveness and accelerate technology transfer and ramp.
“The acquisition of ObjectSpace's Fab Solutions Division, with its industry-leading software and integration expertise, allows us to accelerate the implementation of this powerful new capability with our metrology tools,” added Dickerson. ” As a result, we will be able to deliver APC to our customers more quickly and cost-effectively than would have been achieved if we had internally developed this technology.”
“By combining our software with KLA-Tencor's PMC-Net, customers will be able to more easily and accurately identify the key process tool parameters that need to be controlled to keep manufacturing operations within the desired process window,” said Alan Weber, vice president of Fab Solutions. “As a result, they will be able to significantly cut wafer loss, thereby reducing manufacturing costs and increasing yields.”
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