Femtometrix® announces license agreement with Boeing
Solid State Technology – Femtometrix®, a developer of non-destructive optical metrology systems, announced today that it has entered into a patent and technology license agreement with The Boeing Company. This license allows Femtometrix® to include new, enhanced metrology capabilities into its non-destructive optical metrology products, enabling enhanced yield and reliability at all process nodes.
A prime concern for semiconductor fabricators is the inability to test starting materials in a comprehensive non-destructive manner prior to use. Undetected defects in semiconductor starting materials cause device failure and are a critical problem in the IC (integrated circuit) industry. Femtometrix® has developed a novel quality assurance tool for semiconductor materials metrology that identifies yield and reliability killing defects prior to the final manufacture of the end product.
Femtometrix® non-destructive technique is a contactless, optical characterization method for characterizing surfaces, interfaces, thin films, as well as bulk properties of materials. These metrology systems enable fabs to improve yield by detecting Non-Visual Defects optically. Such defects include surface and buried metallic and organic contamination, as well as other yield killing non- uniformities that cannot be seen by other in-line tools.
Alon Raphael, President of Femtometrix® stated, “We are excited to be using Boeing’s technology to create an optical in-line solution with high throughput for Non-Visual Defects to meet the advancing needs of device fabricators worldwide.”
“When we can redeploy our technology to help another company accelerate their innovation, we consider that a success,” said Peter Hoffman, Boeing Vice President of Intellectual Property Management.
