Yanghua He
Senior Process Development Engineer, Qorvo, Inc.

Biography

Yanghua He, Ph.D., is a Senior Process Development Engineer at Qorvo, Inc., an American semiconductor company founded in 2015 from the merger of TriQuint Semiconductor Inc. and RF Micro Devices. Qorvo designs, manufactures, and supplies radio-frequency systems and solutions for applications that drive wireless and broadband communications. Yanghua joined TriQuint in early 2007 to develop and optimize the Chemical Mechanical Planarization (CMP) processes for the BAW (Bulk Acoustic Wave) production line in the Richardson, Texas fab. Prior to Qorvo, he worked on a team responsible for CMP process transfers between mother and daughter production fabs at Texas Instruments for over six years. He has experience on numerous CMP processes including shallow trench isolation, pre-metal dielectric, and inter-layer dielectrics, as well as tungsten and copper damascene applications. He also worked as a CMP Process Development and Applications Engineer for Equipment manufacturers for several years prior to his experience in wafer manufacturing. A 21-year veteran in the semiconductor industry, Yanghua holds several patents in the CMP field and has developed and sustained CMP processes for 100mm, 150mm, 200mm and 300mm wafers.

Abstract

This paper describes the improvement obtained when using an Applied Materials Mirra Chemical Mechanical Planarization (CMP) system equipped with 150mm Titan Profiler or 200mm Titan Contour wafer-carrier heads, versus a polisher with a basic carrier. The wafer-edge profiles and polish-rate stability were compared between the polishers using different wafer-carrier heads. The polisher usage/capacity and CMP cycle time in production were also compared. Results show that the process stability with 150mm Profiler and 200mm Contour wafer-carrier heads makes daily process qualification unnecessary, and enables the elimination of the time-consuming look-ahead (L/A) step for each product lot. As a result, the polisher usage and CMP capacity was greatly improved to meet the requirement of high volume Bulk Acoustic Wave (BAW) production.