A Theoretical Method for Removal of Gravity-Induced Effects in Silicon Wafer Geometry Measurements
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Ms. Ref. No.: applsci-1822020
Title: An improved method for removal of gravity-induced effects in silicon wafer geometry measurements
Article type: Research Article
Reviewer's Comments:
1. Abstract: Avoid to use “we” in scientific write up.
2. Abstract: Authors should try to highlight the novelty of this work and highlight the importance outcome of this research work.
3. Introduction: Not much information being presented in the section of introduction. Therefore, I would recommend the authors to rewrite this section. Only a total of 4 references being cited which is not acceptable.
4. Methods: References are needed for equation 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11,12, 13, 15, 16.
5. Results and discussion: It is extremely short without any results being presented in this manuscript
Author Response
Dear reviewer, thanks for the time and effort to review the paper. In answer to your questions:
1.- The parts of the text that had the word "we" have been rewritten.
2.- The abstract has been rewritten
3.- The introduction has been improved to give additional importance to the motivation of this work. Also three new referecences have been added.
4.- Equations 1 and 2 were extracted from a previous work and now are cited.
5.- In the results section the method are compared over a broad range of condition in term of angle error and postion error. This paper is intended as a theoretical paper and sadly showing real results is not possible, the main problem is that the ground truth, i.e. a wafer geometry free of gravity is not achievable and industrial tools that estimates it by suporting the wafer in vertical (as KLA-Tecnor tools) do not permit the publication of their results.
I apologize for such a short conclusion section but I just wanted to compress the key information.
Reviewer 2 Report
The font size for texts in Figure 5 and 6 can be increased, presently it is a little difficult to read.
Caption for Figure 2 can be revised to make it more formal sounding and to be contained in a single sentence.
Author Response
Thank for your time and effort reviewing the paper.
The size of figure 5 and 6 have been improved.
The caption in fire 2 has been rewritten.
Reviewer 3 Report
The manuscript under review by Juan M. Trujillo-Sevilla “An improved
method for removal of gravity induced effects in silicon wafer geometry
measurements” reports on an enhanced approach to achieve geometry
testing for Si wafers by removing the effect induced by the gravity and the
contact of the supports.
The manuscript and the work could be interesting for readers, however, at
this stage, I would not recommend its further consideration with MDPI
Applied Sciences. My comments/concerns are detailed below.
(1) The manuscript title invokes that the data will come from real testing/characterization, but I did not find a source or proper/clear explanation of the data origin. Moreover, most of the work is talking about mathematics and simulations only. This should be clarified and corrected.
(2) Authors highlighted the point that the proposed technique is better than the conventional solutions. It would be of high interest for the manuscript and readers to have a comprehensive benchmark table to support these statements. Comparing obtained results with the state-of-the-art results.
(3) MDPI journals have their own and specific formatting rules and styles. This also applies for the Applied Sciences manuscripts. Authors should make an effort to make it in a right way. Guidelines and manuscript styling/formatting is always available on mdpi websites.
(4) For the readers who are not deeply involved in the field, but are interesting in that, Authors should highlight the added value of their work and novelty that this work brings. Moreover, discussion about final application would be very helpful for the manuscript.
(5) The equations used in your manuscript, are they derived by Authors or are they taken from literature? If the second is true, it is necessary to reference all of them correspondingly.
(6) The overall formatting style is very poor.
(7) Information about the testing should be included
(8) Quality of Figures 5 and 6 should be improved. I would recommend to avoid yellow color as its visibility on white background is poor.
(9) Please specify what kind of wafer are considered in this work? Is the proposed method applicable to other wafers in terms of materials, size, weights,…etc.
(10) I would recommend a careful proof reading of the manuscript as in some parts the readability is poor.
Author Response
Dear reviewer, thank you for your time and effort to review the paper. Answering your comments:
1.- Please note this is a fully theoretical paper. Since there is no way to obtain a ground truth geometry of a wafer. Industrial tools that measure the geometry of wafers free of gravity effects place the wafer in vertical orientation so the effect is minimized, even thoughthere is still some effect of the contact points. In this work we have demonstrated using very simple mathematics that the proposed method improves the method published in SEMI standards.
2.- I couldn't find any state-of-the-art published results. Note that the most similar to this is the application of the reference method as is shown in the results section.
3.- Sorry for the formatting but Applied Sciences now accepts free formatting of the paper prior to acceptation (https://www.mdpi.com/journal/applsci/instructions)
4.- We have added a paragraph in the introduction to improve the understaing of the motivation of the work.
5.- Equations 1 and 2 were extracted from bibliograpyh and now are cited. The rest of the equations are original.
6.- As with Applied Sciences accepts free formatting the text was uploaded without format.
7.- Please note the paper is purely theoretical and the method has been validated in simulation. Testing would imply to have the knowledge of a geometry of a wafer free of gravity which is not achievable.
8.- The wafers considered in this paper are only Silicon, but there is no limit to material, in fact, mechanical properties of the material are not considered in this work.
9.- The text has been deeply reviewed and many corrections has been applied.
Reviewer 4 Report
After the review of the manuscript "An improved method for removal of gravity-induced effects in silicon wafer geometry measurements". This could be considered in the topics of the journal of Applied Sciences. This is a very interesting contribution in fields of optoelectronics and light-scattering.
The gravity induced deformation is independent of the rotation. The size and sharpness of the central spot could varie in scatterograms obtained from different strains for gravity-induced effects in silicon wafer.
Questions:
This analysis was done under rotation, is it possible to define the
Zernike moments changes? and what would happen with their magnitude?
Suggestions: This work should be accepted with not changes.
Author Response
Dear reviewer, thanks for your time and effort to review the paper.
I've never thought about Zernike moments and its true that maybe is possible to take advantage of the rotation invariance property.
Thank you
Round 2
Reviewer 1 Report
The authors have submitted the revised version of manuscript but I noticed that the number of references for this paper consists only 9 references. I believed that the number of references are relatively low. In addition, I have highlighted the needs to provide citation on all equations being presented in this paper. However, there are quite a number of equations without any citation.
Author Response
Dear reviewer thanks for the response. Answering your comments:
I know this paper cites few references and I'd also like to have more references to add but I am afraid there are not many relevant references related with this topic. Please consider also that two imporant papers related with the topic (Liu et al and Natsu et al) only have 9 and 10 references each. The problem is there are very few references related with this topic in the literature.
Regarding the citation of equations, note that all equations are original in this paper except equations 1 and 2. These equations are cited as they have been extracted from SEMI mf1390-0707 standard.
Thank you.
