Trikon's in-Situ End Point Detection Increases Yield and Reduces Cost of Dry Etching for Power Semiconductors.

NEWPORT, Wales -- Trikon Technologies Inc. (Nasdaq:TRKN), today announced that leading power device makers that have recently switched to using Omega ICP etchers in production are benefiting from Trikon's industry leading depth resolution. In turn this leads to higher device yield and lower overall costs. A major reason for the improvements is the use of in-situ interferometric end-point detection (IEPD).

In a power MOSFET device the source and drain regions lie along the sidewall of a dry etched trench and polysilicon fills the trench to form the gate. The depth resolution of the initial silicon trench and the depth of the remaining recess following the polysilicon etch-back step are both critical to the overall device performance. IEPD continuously records the progress of the etch front and automatically terminates the process at a pre-programmed depth.

"IEPD allows our customers to match process performance wafer to wafer. The repeatability is excellent - for example if we etch a 1.5 um deep trench we end up with a 1(sigma) deviation of 0.011 um, that's 0.7%. We can also achieve deviations of 0.8% on 6 um deep trenches for IGBT (insulated gate bipolar transistor) devices", said Dr Dave Thomas, Etch Marketing Manager at Trikon. "Timed etches simply cannot deliver this degree of accuracy. Chamber condition alone can introduce variations of plus or minus 4 % across the first few wafers of a batch when IEPD is not used. Customers using Trikon's IEPD are benefiting from an increased number of yielding die and reduced levels of re-work and scrap."

This is a good example of Trikon developing value added solutions for its core markets. Based on identified customer needs the IEPD project was accelerated from initial lab feasibility of stand-alone OEM parts to the final fully integrated production solution offered today. Trikon

has established a leadership position and continues to receive significant interest from power device makers in its dry etch solutions.

Jessica Davis of 'Electronic Business' recently reported on trends in the power management market (August 2004) saying that "Everyone is talking about the best way to direct and distribute power in digital chips" and that "Companies that specialize in power management...have been posting record revenues and many see no end in sight to this growth, in spite of uncertainty in the industry."

About IEPD

IEPD involves shining a light onto the wafer and monitoring the reflections from multiple interfaces in real time as the wafer is etched. Constructive or destructive interference, that depends on the path-length between the wafer and the detector, results in very high accuracy depth measurement. The light source can conveniently be a 'white light' source. No wafer alignment is required - the detector simply collects an average signal over a large area of the wafer (typically 3 cm spot size), often positioned at the wafer centre. The collected intensity trace is a combination of the interference pattern caused by the etching Si trench and that caused by the etching of the mask material. Data management software allows the traces to be separated leading to a real time depth measurement that has excellent correlation with ex-situ measurements such as AFM (atomic force microscopy). The recess depth during the polysilicon etch-back process can also be analyzed in the same way. The commonality in detector optics also means that IEPD systems may be used for more conventional optical emission spectroscopy.

About Trikon Technologies

Trikon Technologies is a leading provider of wafer fabrication equipment and services to the global semiconductor industry. Trikon develops and manufactures advanced capital equipment for plasma etching and chemical and physical vapor deposition (CVD and PVD) of thin films for use in the production of semiconductor devices. These are key components in most advanced electronic products, such as telecommunication devices, consumer and industrial electronics and computers. More information is available on the internet at: www.trikon.com