IP Library › Granted Patent US 11,840,757
Granted Patent B2
US 11,840,757 · App. 17/348,238 · Granted Dec 12, 2023

Film deposition system, factory system, and method of depositing film on wafer

Inventors: Tsuyoshi Suzuki (Tokyo, JP); Katsuyuki Nakada (Tokyo, JP); Tomoyuki Sasaki (Tokyo, JP)
Assignee: TDK CORPORATION
C23C14/54C23C14/34C23C16/52G06F30/27G06F2111/10
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Quick Facts
Patent No.
US 11,840,757
App. No.
17/348,238
Granted
Dec 12, 2023
Kind
B2
Abstract

A film deposition system according to the present embodiment includes a film deposition apparatus, and a computer, in which the film deposition apparatus includes a film deposition chamber in which a plurality of deposition species are installable, and the computer includes a calculation region that calculates based on a calculation model having an Ising model or QUBO, and predict a time required for film deposition when a disposition of the deposition species is set.

Claims (189)

1. A film deposition system comprising:

a film deposition apparatus including film deposition chambers in which a plurality of deposition species are respectively installable; and

a computer configured to:

calculate based on a calculation model having an Ising model or quadratic unconstrained binary optimization (QUBO); and

predict a time required for film deposition when a disposition of the deposition species is set,

wherein the Ising model or the QUBO has first elements of a number corresponding to a product of the number of the deposition species and the number of the film deposition chambers, and each of the first elements is a binary variable.

2. The film deposition system according to claim 1 , wherein an energy function of the Ising model or the QUBO indicates a value corresponding to a throughput of the film deposition apparatus.

3. The film deposition system according to claim 1 , wherein the Ising model or the QUBO has the first elements that interact with each other due to an interaction parameter, and the interaction parameter is determined from values corresponding to a transfer time of a wafer to be deposited on and a processing time in each process required to process the transferred wafer at a specific slot in one of the chambers.

4. The film deposition system according to claim 1 , wherein the Ising model or the QUBO is represented by:

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when both an i-th process and an i−1-th process are film deposition with a deposition species that can be disposed in a different chamber,

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when the i-th process is film deposition with the deposition species that can be disposed in the different chamber, and the i−1-th process is film deposition with a deposition species that cannot be disposed in the different chamber,

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when the i-th process is film deposition with the deposition species that cannot be disposed in the different chamber, and the i−1-th process is film deposition with the deposition species that can be disposed in the different chamber, and

h t ( i )− t _deliver ch(stack i-1 ),ch(stack i ) +t _process stack i

when both the i-th process and the i−1-th process are film deposition with the deposition species that cannot be disposed in the different chamber,

wherein t_deliver j,k is a transfer time from a j-th chamber to a k-th chamber, and t_process stack i is a processing time of the i-th process, and wherein h t (i) is a value corresponding to a time required for film deposition in the i-th process, N ch is the number of film deposition chambers, and x k,seed(stack i ) is a state of one of the first elements defined as 1 when the deposition species for the i-th process is disposed in the k-th chamber and defined as 0 in other cases.

5. The film deposition system according to claim 4 , wherein

the film deposition apparatus further includes a process chamber which performs a process other than film deposition; and

processing in the process chamber is defined as a process that is not replaceable with processing in another chamber in the Ising model or the QUBO.

6. The film deposition system according to claim 1 , wherein

the Ising model or the QUBO has a constraint; and

the constraint reflects an upper limit of the number of deposition species of the same type among the deposition species.

7. The film deposition system according to claim 1 , wherein

the Ising model or the QUBO has a constraint; and

the constraint reflects an upper limit of a number of slots of the deposition species in the film deposition chambers.

8. The film deposition system according to claim 7 , wherein

the Ising model or the QUBO further has second elements of a number corresponding to a sum of the number of slots in each film deposition chamber as the constraint, and

the second elements are binary variables.

9. The film deposition system according to claim 1 , wherein

the Ising model or the QUBO has a constraint; and

the constraint reflects a condition that deposition species that have a chance of being deposited simultaneously on a wafer are disposed in the same film deposition chamber.

10. The film deposition system according to claim 1 , wherein

the Ising model or the QUBO has a constraint; and

the constraint reflects a condition that times until the plurality of deposition species will reach an end of their service lives are substantially the same.

11. The film deposition system according to claim 1 , wherein

the Ising model or the QUBO has a constraint; and

the Ising model or the QUBO further has a third element representing a process cycle and a processing time for a process of a wafer as the constraint, and the element is a binary variables.

12. The film deposition system according to claim 1 , wherein

the Ising model or the QUBO has a constraint; and

the Ising model or the QUBO further has a fourth element representing a loading time of a wafer to be loaded as the constraint, and the element is a binary variables.

13. The film deposition system according to claim 1 , wherein

the computer further includes a storage which stores a disposition of specific deposition species and a time required for film deposition in a case of the disposition of the specific deposition species as teacher data, and

the computer is configured to determine an interaction parameter between the first elements of the Ising model or the QUBO by machine learning which is based on the teacher data and designs the calculation model.

14. The film deposition system according to claim 13 , wherein the storage reacquires a disposition of the deposition species used for prediction and a time required for the predicted film deposition as the teacher data.

Assignments (1)
ASSIGNMENT OF ASSIGNOR'S INTEREST Recorded Jun 15, 2021
From: SUZUKI, TSUYOSHI; NAKADA, KATSUYUKI; SASAKI, TOMOYUKI
To: TDK CORPORATION
Reel/Frame 056551/0164 →
Priority Claims (2)
WO PCT/JP2020/026641 · Jul 8, 2020 · international
JP 2021-037581 · Mar 9, 2021 · national
Continuity (1)
Related Publication 20220010423A1 · Jan 13, 2022