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Rising complexity and density of device designs result in a tremendous increase of reticle inventory costs. Due to advanced RET solutions, reticle acquisition time and prices, as well as the data volume to be managed, increase significantly. High-energy exposure tools and new categories of progressive defects have an increasing impact on the reticle life time. New technologies, smaller feature sizes and shorter wavelengths raise challenges like haze, crystal growth and ESD. State of the art FABs have an ever-increasing amount of automation systems to run the processing steps. This requires all supporting systems to keep pace. New tool generations have very large throughput capability. So delays due to reticle availability have an even larger impact on output than previously. The real-time dispatching system needs to be able to automatically select and reserve suitable reticles to avoid exposure tool idle time. Reticles are a major fab asset and are one of the bottlenecks in achieving maximum efficiency in semiconductor manufacturing. An intelligent and fully automated reticle life cycle management is crucial to meet today's target quality and production goals at reasonable cost. All reticle data - from cradle to grave - needs to be stored in one central database to ensure consistency, performance and accuracy of data and trend analysis. The solutions described mainly result from the ramp-up at a new 300mm DRAM semiconductor facility. One of the key requirements was to fully automate the entire reticle data flow without human interaction or paper work. The given customer business rules were modeled to automatically monitor the reticle work flow. At the same time, highest flexibility was required to easily adjust the configuration to upcoming changes or improvements.
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