Yes, JPSI could do these things. They could do many things they have not done. I am so unimpressed with the management of JPSI that I hold little hope that they will be effective at their current charter, let alone tackling these new applications. The company video is an investor sales pitch, remember? JPSI has NO significant inspection capability at this time. The only thing coming close to matching this claim, and where the millionth inch precision comes in, is in their video metrology systems. However, even if they had some established inspection capability, moving to x-ray would not be a cake walk. The technical challenges are significant. On top of this, JPSI lacks market presence and domain expertise in any of these area mentioned by Foster.
Foster is on to some excellent applications for x-rays, but there is a lot of work to be done in each of these areas. Every application he mentioned needs a tremendous amount of systems engineering. From this perspective, the x-ray source is "just" a light bulb.
The overall accuracy of a wafer inspection machine is reduced from a stepper, and JPSI stuff might be made to work for this application, and certainly could work for other applications.
Also, circuits now fabricated with UV light are inspected with visible light. This is possible because of very sophisticated image processing algorithms and specialized techniques. Also, UV is being used, and I believe coherent UV is also being used, in first pass "go/no go" inspections. Visible inspection, called second optical, is then used to more closely examine and classify defects. Mask inspection will also have to track the smaller wavelengths.
The markets for these inspections are dominated by some real heavyweights, such as KAL-Tencor and Applied Materials. As feature sizes get smaller, there will not be a way to "get enough light into the holes" unless the light is way up in the spectrum. You can bet that the established equipment manufacturers are already into some significant R&D to solve this problem. A relatively inexpensive x-ray source may be a key component in their solutions, but probably not their main concern.
The main point is that each of these application areas is populated with providers and domain experts that have solved the "real" problems of the material science, optics, imaging, image processing, clean room requirements, part handling, etc. It is these experts that should recognize the value of the BriteLight laser and the PXS if and when the products are real, producible and marketed.
The big boys have enough proprietary strength and inertia to simply squash a newcomer like JPSI. This is why I don't think JPSI figures heavily in this. The only way this would be changed is to change the nature of JPSI significantly, and I don't see that happening at all. |
