A bird's eye view of IC fabrication

Demystifying Chipmaking, by Richard F. Yanda, Michael Heynes, and Anne K. Miller, Newnes (www.newnespress.com), 2005. 256 pages. $49.95.

Rick Nelson, Chief Editor -- Test & Measurement World, 8/1/2005

Semiconductors are pervasive, but detailed knowledge about how they are fabricated is not—except among the manufacturing and process engineers who produce them. If you're designing and testing boards, subsystems, or complete products, Demystifying Chipmaking won't have you fabricating Pentiums in your garage, but it will provide an interesting overview of the IC fabrication process while familiarizing you with the terminology.

Topics range from contamination control to the dual-damascene metal-interconnect process, which has come a long way from the Middle Ages technique for which it's named. The book introduces timely topics, covering low-k dielectrics and why they are important (to improve chip speeds by minimizing parasitic capacitance), and it describes the pellicles that prevent reticle contamination from causing chip defects (by keeping contaminating particles sufficiently far from the reticle that they are out of focus and consequently not printed on a target wafer's surface).

Test-related topics include a brief description on the use of statistical process control to employ test and inspection results to maintain yields. A chapter on test and assembly describes parametric tests on transistors embedded in a wafer for that purpose as well as functional tests at wafer probe and final package test, but it omits any mention of scan tests or other design-for-test (DFT) approaches. In a chapter on design, the book cites several groups for chip-making credit—layout, logic, applications, architectural, and technology-transfer engineers—but it neglects to mention DFT engineers.

The book comes with a CD-ROM that provides video of various chip-making stages. For your colleagues who aren't engineers, there's an appendix that provides the basics of the chemistry and physics behind semiconductor fabrication and behavior. (Disclosure: The book's publisher is owned by Test & Measurement World's parent company.)