Moore's law: implications for ion implant equipment an equipment designer's perspective

The fourfold increase in device packing every three years drives changes in manufacturing strategy, for example clean room design and wafer size. It also directly drives ion implant equipment changes to address changing process requirements. Many requirements have inexorably become more stringent, e.g. numbers of particles added, contamination levels, energy purity, and automation. Thinner gate oxides and reductions in on-chip operating voltage have driven very dramatic improvements in the control of wafer charging. The energy range of implanters has become wider and for high-current implanters there are requests from users for a 50-fold increase in the range of energies over which the implanter can be used. Larger wafers have driven the change to parallel scanning and are driving a change to single-wafer processing. Can these requirements simultaneously be met? Is a universal ion implanter a rest-effective solution? What will be the energy and dose ranges of the available ion implanters for 0.18 micron devices?.