| BEOL | Back End of Line, normally processes after first interconnect metal is deposited.
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| CMP | Chemical-mechanical planarization / Chemical-mechanical polishing. A technique used in semiconductor fabrication for planarizing a semiconductor wafer or other substrate. Often used for Cu layers to produce flat layers of a required thickness.
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| FEOL | Front End of Line, normally processes before interconnect metal is deposited
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| GMR | Giant Magneto-resistance is a quantum mechanical magnetoresistance effect observed in thin film structures composed of alternating ferromagnetic and nonmagnetic layers. It is used in the read-write heads in modern disk drives
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| HBT | A Hetero-Bipolar Transistor can handle signals of very high frequencies up to several hundred GHz. It is common in modern ultrafast circuits, mostly radio-frequency (RF) systems, as well as applications requiring a high power efficiency, such as power amplifiers in cellular phones. Commonly manufactured from compound semiconductors, but now SiGe based transistors are becoming more popular.
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| HDD | Hard Disk Drive
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| HEMT | High Electron Mobility Transistors ere field effect transistors incorporating a junction between two materials with different band gaps (i.e., a heterojunction) as the channel instead of a doped region, as is generally the case for MOSFETs. A commonly used material combination is GaAs with AlGaAs, though there is wide variation, dependent on the application of the device.
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| High-k | Layers with high dielectric constant, used as the gate dielectric within the transisitor.
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| HRXRD | High resolution X-ray diffraction, used for the analysis of epitaxial thin films. Can determine thickness, composition, relaxation, mismatch, wafer curvature of epitaxial films and substrates
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| Low-k | Layers with low dielectric constant, often porous, used as spacers between metal interconnect layers.
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| MRAM | Magnetic Random Access Memory a non-volatile computer memory (NVRAM) technology, which uses magnetic elements to store data
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| ONO | A 3-layer strucure of silicon oxide / slilicon nitride / silicon oxide used in the gate in a flash memory transistor
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| RDL | Re-distribution Layer. Metal layers between IC interconnect and solder bump
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| RSM | Reciprocal Space Maps. Maps in high resolution X-ray diffraction, which allow the separation of tilt mosaic and strain effects of epitaxial layers,
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| UBM | Under Bump Metal. Layer between the top of the IC interconnect and the solder bump.
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| WLP | Wafer-Level Packaging (WLP) refers to the technology of packaging an integrated circuit at wafer level, instead of the traditional process of assembling the package of each individual unit after wafer dicing.
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| XRD | X-ray Diffraction. A technique in which the patterns formed by the diffraction of X-rays on passing through a crystalline substance yield information on the lattice structure of the crystal, and the molecular structure of the substance.
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| XRDI | X-ray Diffraction Imaging, also Topography or Defect Imaging. A method of visualising cystalline defects.
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| XRR | X-ray Reflectometry. Uses the specular reflection of X-rays from the interfaces at very low angles to determine thickness, roughness and density.
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