The wafer foundry is responsible for transforming circuit designs into mass-producible chips, focusing on completing each process such as thin film deposition, etching, wiring, and thermal treatment in a stable and repeatable manner. As the process nodes gradually advance from mature processes to 7nm, 5nm, 3nm, and even GAA architecture, the material stacking inside the chips becomes denser, significantly increasing inter-layer interfaces, metal wiring density, and thermal load, making process consistency and structural stability control crucial.
In actual mass production, even minor changes in process parameters, material sources, or equipment status can lead to differences in component characteristics or electrical distribution. For example, the interface quality between the contact layer and the wiring layer, dielectric layer breakdown voltage, metal migration behavior, and lifespan under thermal cycling all affect whether the chip can operate stably. Therefore, wafer foundries must continuously verify whether the process results are consistent and can be replicated over the long term during R&D introduction, trial production adjustments, mass production scaling, and cross-factory production.
MA-tek assists wafer foundries in establishing traceable criteria at these critical points. We confirm inter-layer and interface quality through high-resolution structural analysis, clarify the sources of anomalies with failure localization, and predict the stability of materials and structures under long-term use through reliability verification. These results can be directly applied to process parameter adjustments, yield improvement, supply chain management, and new process introduction decisions.