30 | January 2019
At first semiconductor companies were created by mav-
ericks developing products and bringing them to market, of-
ten as fast as they could. They strove to provide process
control but these companies were startups with limited re-
sources, very short design cycles and large process geom-
etries (by today's standards). So, they could get away with
instruments that were "reasonably accurate" and processes
could be tuned to the instrument you had in hand.
However, as the semiconductor industry matured, ge-
ometries dropped, production volumes soared, and it be-
came increasingly important to fine tune the manufacturing
processes and in most cases transfer these processes off-
shore. In order to do that they could no longer rely on the
instrument they'd used to fine tune the process on their
pilot line, they had to be able to specify a process using
parameters that could be measured using any 'standard'
