Ahmad Niroumand

• In addition to responsibilities of Principal Technician, I also took on responsibilities of Shift Lead Technician.
• Manage inventory
• Notify the team of potential issues, look ahead for process bottlenecks and implement plans to ensure process delays are eliminated or minimized.
• Manage experiments attached to Production and Development lots according to team daily, short term and long term goals
• Ensure that all experimental splits of lots, including targets are merged at proper steps and updated lot documents of sacrificial wafers used to collect information
• Attend daily process meetings and update the team on progress and/or issues, lot, process or staffing issues.
• Work one on one with individual engineers to allocate wafers for experiments, generate split wafer reports (SWRs) according to their expectations, request lots and attach to SWRs.
• Manage and maintain project priority material.
• Update inventory.
• Monitor SWRs inline.
• Resolve SWR, Lot and Process issues (Onsite or remotely (24X7) coverage.
• Update the Technician team under my leadership of daily priorities, monitor progress and ensure technicians had the resources required to complete their task.
• Verify said task for completion and correctness.
• Update team inventory multiple times per shift, especially where material may have been misprocessed, Investigate and assign cause. Ensure that steps are taken to prevent such mistake again. make sure replacement material is assigned and in place with required experiments attached.
• Maintain priority lists several times per shift
• Keep open communication lines with all process areas, development and Production regarding priority material, processing expectations, tool readiness
• Liaison between Management / Process Development Engineering and Fab Production personnel.
• In case production teams were too busy to process certain lots, obtain permission from the area managers to run Metrology and RDA tools through a TOOL REQUEST program in order to collect the required information for the team
• Conducted Split Wafer Report review working with Production and Development managers to approve SWRs and allocate material or reject for modifications.
• Forward the meeting minutes to the team.
• Worked on multiple technologies and generations of DRAM, Flash NAND/NOR, Through Silicon Via (TSV), PCRAM and MRAM

In addition to Standard Principal Technician Responsibilities, I was also Responsible for managing other projects critical to Fab and Company success.

In order to achieve these goals I made myself available to address and resolve questions, issues and ensure correct information was collected.

• Construction Analysis Standardization and Automation which was transferred to R&D Production Team for debug before transferring to production fabs.
• This was originally a manual process between Process Integration, RDA and SEM teams.

RDA and SEM teams provided the structural images and location. Process Integration Technician team conducted the required measurements, documented and published the data.

• I was tasked with automating this project which we accomplished our objectives by utilizing members of several teams, including bringing in individuals with related management expertise. Project Management, Metrology, SEM/STEM, IS/IT Process Integration Module owners.
• We succeeded in accomplishing the objective and the project was set to be transferred to Production Fabs within the US and Overseas
• Length of the project 2+ years to identify requirements and link production fab data collection system to SEM Lab STEM tools, collect data and automate measurements of specific structure and location within the die and on the wafer.
• Top Priority material daily wafer health report.
• Purpose of this report was to identify compromised within Top Priority lots, assign cause, notify proper groups, scrap affected wafers. wafers, provide feedback for course of action.

This report was an immediate success and was implemented as part of the R&D and Production fabs daily lot and equipment updates. It saved the company from spending time and resources on wafers that could not yield reliable probe data and helped our Process Development team to achieve yield gols more efficiently.

(Length of the project approximately 6 months.)

• Standard SEM Lab responsibilities included but wasn't limited to the following:
• Operate, maintain minor quals/adjustment to the SEM tools
• Communicate major issues to the tool reps for prompt repair
• Sample prep using various methods, Cleave, Micro Cleave, FIB, Polish back, Deprocess
• Operate wet hood and maintain current certifications for Hazardous material handling and Chemical Transport
• Maintain all other area certifications
• Train new employees
• Update training manuals with the latest design/part/generation specific requirements applicable to Yield Enhancement team
• In addition to my responsibilities I would regularly accept engineering projects to help both Yield Enhancement and Process Development engineers collect and evaluate the information
• I also took on multiple experiments to improve the quality of processes used to highlight samples to be reviewed in the SEM tools for better results on what the team delivered to our customers
• This included experimenting with the Platinum Sputter tool and running variations of Wet Cleans for cleaner samples and better etch uniformity
• During my time in the YE lab I received several commendations for taking on extra responsibilities and by focusing on nonstandard work I was able to assist several Process Development engineers find and resolve issues with their respective modules and processes and process areas to find equipment issues that weren't monitored in the standard tool quals

• Manage and process WIP (Work in progress)
• Prioritize primary Production and Development material in the queue and manage on-time processing through the area
• Qualify equipment for processing, take mitigation steps to bring them within processing specs or notify the engineering and equipment team if the particular equipment needed to be idle for cleaning and or repairs
• Collect required critical information for processing material
• Film thicknesses, Critical Dimensions, x-section
• Investigate root causes for issues and bring to shift engineering attention
• Communicate and work with corresponding areas regarding high priority material and required to be expedited
• Update lot history of potentially compromised, damaged or destroyed wafers to maintain correct wafer count
• Generate Quality Deviation Report for any abnormal or OOC conditions for final lot eval
• Train new Operators
• Maintain operator certifications
• Update training manuals and documentation
• Communicate Generic Recipe Management team with process modification to prevent misprocessing material
• Write employee progress reports to be used in periodic supervisor evals
• Maintain shift readiness to prevent equipment idle time
• Ensure equipment availability for high priority lots or per engineering request
• In addition to Dry Etch operator and Trainer responsibilities, I was involved with several engineering projects such as new Tool or Process recipe Qual
• Recipes Etch rates and Critical Dimensions measurements to assist our Process Development engineers with their workload