The metrology domain (which could be considered as the ‘eyes and ears’ for both R&D&I and production) is a key enabler for productivity enhancements in many industries across the electronic components and system (ECS) value chain and have to be an integral part of any Cyber Physical Systems (CPS) which consist of metrology equipment, virtual metrology or Industrial internet of things (IIoT) sensors, edge and high-performance computing (HPC). The requirements from the metrology is to support ALL process steps toward the final product. However, for any given ECS technology, there is a significant trade-off between the metrology sensitivity, precision and accuracy to its productivity. MADEin4 address this deficiency by focusing on two productivity boosters which are independent from the sensitivity, precision and accuracy requirements: • Productivity booster 1: High throughput, next generation metrology and inspection tools development for the nanoelectronics industry (all nodes down to 5nm). This booster will be developed by the metrology equipment’s manufacturers and demonstrated in an industry 4.0 pilot line at imec and address the ECS equipment, materials and manufacturing major challenges (MASP Chapter 15, major challenges 1 – 3). • Productivity booster 2: CPS development which combines Machine Learning (ML) of design (EDA) and metrology data for predictive diagnostics of the process and tools performances predictive diagnostics of the process and tools performances (predictive yield and tools performance). This booster will be developed and demonstrated in an industry 4.0 pilot line at imec, for the 5nm node, by the EDA, computing and metrology partners (MASP Chapter 15, major challenge 4). The same CPS concept will be demonstrated for the ‘digital industries’ two major challenges of the nanoelectronics (all nodes down to 5nm) and automotive end user’s partners (MASP Chapter 9, major challenges 1and 3).

Within the food chain of equipment delivery for the semiconductor industry, Europe has kept a very strong position in the metrology area with many companies establishing themselves as main leaders in the field. Hence in line with the objectives of the ICT25 call for innovation action to overcome the (initial) barriers for the successful commercialization of novel European products, this project aims at exploring for a number of metrology solutions their technological readiness, reliability and relevance of the developed protocols, and the COO. The portfolio within the project covers new metrology concepts addressing specifically the processing challenges linked to 3D-Devices and range from probing basic layer properties (composition, electrical properties) in FEOL to control of metallization in BEOL up to issues linked to die stacking. Due to the specific processing steps which need to be addressed, three separate metrology tools will be assessed in this project i.e a Tofsims system (IonTOF) with build-in Scanning Probe stage and FIB column for true 3D-composition profiling, a completely automated micro-Hall and sheet resistance measurement tool (Capres) with additional capabilities for measurements on dedicated test structures (prior to full BEOL) and an GHz acoustic Microscope (Tepla) for probing voids in TSV’s and stacked dies. As some of them (IonTOf, Capres) are addressing partly complementary information (composition versus electrical properties), their co-existence in this project creates additional value as beyond the tool assessment also a methodology based on combining these concepts can be explored and certified. Moreover a significant efficiency gain is created as they can employ similar test structures and devices. For each of these tools, the basic metrology concepts are existing and validated in the lab on selected applications but their general applicability field within the semiconductor industry still needs to be established