A comparison of principal component analysis, multiway principal component analysis, trilinear decomposition and parallel factor analysis for fault detection in a semiconductor etch process

Multivariate statistical process control (MSPC) tools have been developed for monitoring a Lam 9600 TCP metal etcher at Texas Instruments. These tools are used to determine if the etch process is operating normally or if a system fault has occurred. Application of these methods is complicated because the etch process data exhibit a large amount of normal systematic variation. Variations due to faults of process concern can be relatively minor in comparison. The Lam 9600 used in this study is equipped with several sensor systems including engineering variables (e.g. pressure, gas flow rates and power), spatially resolved optical emission spectroscopy (OES) of the plasma and a radio-frequency monitoring (RFM) system to monitor the power and phase relationships of the plasma generator. A variety of analysis methods and data preprocessing techniques have been tested for their sensitivity to specific system faults. These methods have been applied to data from each of the sensor systems separately and in combination. The performance of the methods on a set of benchmark fault detection problems is presented and the strengths and weaknesses of the methods are discussed, along with the relative advantages of each of the sensor systems. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.