Thermo Fisher Scientific launches Helios 5 DualBeam SEM

At the recent SEMICON China 2019 show in Shanghai, Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc unveiled its latest focused ion beam scanning electron microscope (FIB-SEM) for nanometer-scale materials characterization and analysis.

With pilot production beginning in April, the Helios 5 DualBeam FIB-SEM is available in HX, FX and UX configurations, which address a broad range of industrial and research challenges. The FX and HX configurations are particularly focused on the needs of semiconductor manufacturers, fabless chip designers, materials researchers and analytical labs.

“As the semiconductor industry develops products for 5G, artificial intelligence, machine learning and autonomous driving, the need for smaller, faster and more efficient data processing increases,” says Mike Shafer, president, materials & structural analysis. “The new feedback systems and neural-network-based software in the Helios 5 microscope delivers productivity, repeatability and ease-of-use that will help our semiconductor customers deliver the devices needed to advance new technologies,” he adds.

The Helios 5 addresses the increasing number of semiconductor technological challenges, including the need to develop products using smaller geometries, 3D structures, new materials and higher volumes of analytical samples for yield enhancement and root-cause analysis.

Compared with the previous generation, the Helios 5 improvements provide greater stability and ease of use, which can help to reduce the operator expertise needed, says the firm. Operator training may be reduced from months to days and is designed to enable all operators to achieve consistent, repeatable results on a wide variety of advanced applications. These productivity improvements produce a higher volume of high-quality samples, allowing the acceleration of both yield ramp and excursion resolution, it is reckoned.

Other improvements include AutoTEM 5, new monitoring hardware, smart alignments and process readiness software enhancements. All are designed to ensure that the system is in the optimal operating state for either manual or automated workflows and can reduce the alignment time from tens of minutes to seconds, increasing system productivity by at least 15% compared with prior generations of Helios microscopes. The Helios 5 TEM and Atom Probe sample preparation software can also increase access to the most advanced atomic-scale structural and compositional information and enable high-quality subsurface and 3D information at the nanometer scale with precise targeting of the region of interest, adds the firm.

Tags: Analysis

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