A history of commercial implantation

Abstract History has many voices and in this one the speaker will endeavor to describe the circumstances that molded the equipment manufacturing companies in which he has been involved since 1956. The talk will concentrate on those activities in which the author was personally concerned. The ion implanter as we now know it has evolved from an intricate background of technologies in nuclear, atomic, and electron physics. In a very short period the equipment available for wafer processing has changed from a laboratory instrument to a sophisticated piece of production equipment. In the early days it was difficult to satisfy the most elementary customer requirements such as dose uniformity and accuracy let alone reliability. In a span of ten years the improvements have been remarkable and yet at the same time the criteria by which equipment is judged has tightened and the same shortcomings still have a priority. However to the list of implanter parameters other factors have emerged such as automation, charge neutralization, particulates and temperature control of the targets, so that the design of new equipment becomes increasingly complicated.