Critical concerns and special requirements for technology transferred from R&D to manufacturing

Due to the different emphasis on R&D and production divisions, as technology is transferred from R&D to manufacturing, several issues have to be considered and overcome to make process transfer successful. Generally, when a process is ready for mass production, it should have achieved several targets already, like elimination of all unnecessary process steps and documentation of all necessary information. More requirements are that all process windows are tuned to meet existing manufacturing capability and mass production related factors have been included in process design. The impact from the new process to the existing process tools must be evaluated also. In one word, the process used in manufacture must be foolproof. Yet, in the real world, compromise between the R&D and manufacture has to be made to speed up the process transfer from R&D to manufacturing. Several process related cases, which come out with the difference between R&D and mass production environment, including Cs-SiN CVD pre-clean times cause cell to cell leakage and machine PM schedule between different process. From our experiments, well-established transfer systems, effective process improvement systems and full cooperation between R&D and production divisions will make technology transfer much faster and smoother.