Throughput Improvement

Raw throughput improvement can be achieved by reducing the amount of material that must be polished away, increasing film removal rates, and increasing the wafer-handling efficiency. Wafer-handling efficiency is addressed in the following sections. 

The ideal deposition process would leave a perfectly flat surface. That does not happen, so a planarization process is required to maintain depth of field requirements. For a dielectric planarization process, the ideal planarization process would remove only material in the up areas and remove no material in the down areas. Metal CMP involves the removal of metal overburden, leaving filled plugs or vias (single damascene) or filled vias and inlaid metal lines (dual damascene) with no removal of metal in the inlaid region and no removal of dielectric. 

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The Cluster Tool Concept. A recent trend in semiconductor equipment is the integration of two or more functions, such as CVD, PVD, etching, stripping, or rapid thermal processing, in one piece of equipment the so-called cluster tool. A continuous vacuum can be maintained, a feature which reduces the handling and contamination problems, increases the overall throughput, improves the process control, and generally lowers the cost. 

Chapter 4 Throughput Improvement of Bioanalytical LC/MS/MS by Sharing Detector... 

Flow injection analysis is based on the injection of a liquid sample into a continuously flowing liquid carrier stream, where it is usually made to react to give reaction products that may be detected. FIA offers the possibility in an on-line manifold of sample handling including separation, preconcentration, masking and color reaction, and even microwave dissolution, all of which can be readily automated. The most common advantages of FIA include reduced manpower cost of laboratory operations, increased sample throughput, improved precision of results, reduced sample volumes, and the elimination of many interferences. Fully automated flow injection analysers are based on spectrophotometric detection but are readily adapted as sample preparation units for atomic spectrometric techniques. Flow injection as a sample introduction technique has been discussed previously, whereas here its full potential is briefly surveyed. In addition to a few books on FIA [168,169], several critical reviews of FIA methods for FAAS, GF AAS, and ICP-AES methods have been published [170,171]. 

Dry extmders can successfully process soybeans without the additional use of steam conditioning. This may be advantageous in terms of oil availability. However, the use of a steam conditioner in conjunction with dry extmders will increase throughput, improve inhibitor destraction, and enhance the biological value of the protein in the end product. 

FIGURE 5.11 Metabolite profiling throughput improvements associated with transitioning from HPLC-TopCount to UPLC-ViewLux. (Reprinted from Dear, G.J. et al., J. Chromatogr. B Anal. Technol. Biomed. Life Sci., 868, 49, 2008. With permission.)... 

The instrument should only carry out the requested tests and use the sample volume required. Some simple Instruments allow the Implementation of analytical procedures requiring as little as 20 (iL of sample and featuring excellent precision, reliability and throughput. Improvements In this respect have been aimed at developing automated instruments performing functions similar to those carried out manually. A reasonable goal In this sense Is the possibility of carrying out twenty freely selected assays with 100 (iL of blood sample, which results In a typical sample volume of 5 iL. Such a small volume... 

Flow injection analysis (FIA) combined with biosensors offer new applications in the field of automated analysis and process control. Biosensors with rapid response time ensure high sample throughput, improve the sensitivity and decrease the cost of analysis. 

These results lead to an asymptotic throughput per node of O (l/ ). This is significantly worse than the results showed in Table 19.5, mainly because ofthe presence of gateways, which are the networkbottlenecks. Clearly, the available throughput improves with the increase of the number of gateways in the network. 

Preparative HPLC has been widely used for purification of peptides and small molecules for over a decade. Its inherent serial nature, lack of automation, and severe throughput limits, would seem to make it unsuitable for purification of large and diverse compound libraries. Recent advances in automation, detection, and method development, however, now make it possible to purify hundreds of compounds per day using a single instrument. Further throughput improvements may come from parallel HPLC systems which have been recently reported. 

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