Fraunhofer Institute, IPMS, has achieved a major milestone

The Fraunhofer Institute for Photonic Microsystems IPMS, in collaboration with DIVE imaging systems GmbH, has achieved a major milestone in resource-efficient semiconductor manufacturing. With the successful installation of an optical measurement system by DIVE in the cleanroom of Fraunhofer IPMS, the effort required for quality control during wafer production has been significantly reduced. This collaboration paves the way for a more sustainable and efficient semiconductor production process.

Semiconductor manufacturing involves up to 1,500 process steps, including etching, deposition and lithography. Due to their complexity of structures, finished wafers must be nearly defect-free, which requires rigorous quality control. As a result, up to 50% of process steps are dedicated to metrology and thousands of additional control wafers are produced each month. This requires substantial additional financial and material expenditures as well as energy and time resources.

The project “NEST” (New Screening Tool for Efficient Semiconductor Manufacturing) directly addresses this issue. Over the past 1.5 years, DIVE, together with Fraunhofer IPMS and Fraunhofer IZM has conducted an environmental potential analysis. The study revealed that targeted inspection tools could reduce control wafer usage by at least 25%, while also saving more than 118,000 kilograms of CO₂ emissions during production every month. DIVE’s solution uses an innovative combination of spectroscopy and imaging technologies capable of identifying defects even in deeper wafer layers. The analysis was based on a 28 nm manufacturing process and 25,000 wafer starts per month. The project was funded within the “Green ICT Space” by the Research Fab Microelectronics Germany (FMD).