On July 1st, Toshiba Corporation's Semiconductor Company and Storage Products Company consolidated to form Semiconductor & Storage Products Company.This page describes reliability information of semiconductor products.

Manufacturing Process Control

[As of April, 2011]

Facilities

Toshiba establishes facility control regulations to guide the improvement and expansion of production facilities and the implementation of facility safety control. To maintain functionality, facility control incorporates the concept of total productive maintenance (TPM) whereby specific methods, such as facility inspections at the beginning of work, are defined and self-imposed/planned safety measures and inspections are implemented with the aim of identifying quality problems before they occur and stabilizing quality.

Working Environment

The quality and reliability of semiconductor products depends largely on the work environment of manufacturing processes. Cleanliness, temperature and humidity, in particular, require strict control.
Toshiba clean rooms are controlled to the level required. To maintain and improve a clean room, dust is monitored and the source of the dust is periodically analyzed and controlled. In addition, temperature and humidity are monitored and controlled as specified.
The purity of the ultra pure water used in great amounts in the wafer process also greatly affects the quality and reliability of semiconductor products. Therefore, the water is purified using methods such as ion exchange and micron filtering, and the result is monitored and analyzed periodically.
Furthermore, an increasing variety of miniaturization and packaging has led to a growing problem with device failure due to electrostatic discharge (ESD). Toshiba has therefore created guidelines for controlling ESD effectively, particularly during the assembly process.

Process Control

The wafer process for semiconductor products is a series of unit processing including oxidation, diffusion, deposition, pretreatment, etching, ion implantation and photolithography. The latest multilayered products require some 200 steps.
The objective of the assembly process is mounting integrity and function protection. The required level of quality and reliability of a package increases yearly due to greater integration, miniaturization and diversification. Therefore, Toshiba makes every effort to emphasize in-process QC to build in the design-intended quality and reliability, based on the belief that quality and reliability assurance and improvement originates in the manufacturing process.
A QC process chart such as the one shown in Figure 1 is used to clarify the control items, conditions, tools, individuals responsible, and actions at the time of failure for each process. Detailed process control is achieved by recording the data of each process and utilizing the data to check whether or not the product has been made under normal manufacturing conditions, and to trace failures to lots when failure occurs. The manufacturing history of lots in manufacturing process is clearly recorded on travel sheets and check sheets.

This is [Figure 1 Example of QC Process Diagram (CMOS IC)]

Figure 1 Example of QC Process Diagram (CMOS IC)