Have Polarizer – Will Travel: The Need for Ellipsometry Expertise in Industry

If you are interested in the possibility of precipitation next Thursday, you should consult a meteorologist; however, if your focus is the yield on wafers in multibillion dollar, high volume semiconductor fabrication facility, a metrologist would be a good place to start. In any fab, one will find a gaggle of metrology engineers monitoring target, die, and wafer with photon, electron, or ion with any number of tools. One of the most ubiquitous is the humble ellipsometer. A dedicated community of researchers both academic and industrial have labored to construct a pantheon of configurations capable of operating from the VUV to the mid-infrared at the precision and throughput required to meet the standards and pace of modern semiconductor manufacturing. Building these tools, bringing them up to production, matching the measurements on multiple, and keeping them operating at peak efficiency requires individuals with a near prescient understanding of the hardware and fundamental techniques of ellipsometry. Finding and training this niche but critical group is of critical importance to the continued success of the semiconductor industry. In this talk, we shall review the hardware, the problems, and the training needed for the ellipsometry workforce of today and tomorrow.