Senior Optical Engineer | KLA

Posting:  2528643

Group/Division

With over 40 years of semiconductor process control experience, chipmakers around the globe rely on KLA to ensure that their fabs ramp next-generation devices to volume production quickly and cost-effectively. Enabling the movement towards advanced chip design, KLA's Global Products Group (GPG), which is responsible for creating all of KLA’s metrology and inspection products, is looking for the best and the brightest research scientist, software engineers, application development engineers, and senior product technology process engineers. The RAPID division is the world leading provider of reticle inspection solutions for the semiconductor industry. The company provides inspection solutions to both the mask shops and the semiconductor fabs to ensure that lithography yields are consistently high thus enabling cost-effective manufacturing.

Job Description/Preferred Qualifications

General responsibilities are to design, develop, build and qualify various optical subsystems that make up the inspection tool. Specific deliverables include optical system design, optical alignment methodology, and analysis of various optical modules. This person will also lead the design of a custom metrology system to verify and adjust the optical performance of our primary optical system. The candidate will interact closely with the systems engineering group to define performance criteria and system level specification. During the design phase the candidate will work with hardware and software design teams following a rigorous product design protocol. Specific tasks include creating optical models, statistical tolerance analysis, performance predictions, leading design reviews, creating test procedures, and selecting suppliers.

Responsibilities

• Investigate different design options and finding the best option through evaluating tolerances, manufacturability, light budgets and other trade-offs.
• Translate system or subsystem requirements into optical design and manufacturing requirements.
• Perform thorough tolerancing analysis to have a complete system design with full consideration of alignment process and metrology, system calibrations and opto-mech design limitations by working with other groups (systems, ME).
• Design and implement optical alignment and metrology process, test/tooling fixtures to achieve targeted optical performance.
• Follows complete design process, including design reviews, part procurement from vendors, testing, integration, and release.
• Investigate issues from customers or manufacturing and provide option design solution or work-around.
• Propose optical design improvements to enhance a tool performance such as SNR or throughput or manufacturability.
• Debug, and solving of any optical problems that arise with the system.

Qualifications

• Optical design in imaging and illumination systems delivering in-spec performance, cost and manufacturability on time.
• Statistical optical component and alignment tolerancing
• Able to create specs for precision opto-mechanical assemblies
• Proficiency in optical modeling software such as Code V or Zemax or LightTools
• Non-sequential ray tracing using Light Tools to model high precision optics surface scattering, conduct stray light analysis
• Optical module and system build, alignment and debugging
• Test stand design and build: concept, error budget, realization
• Knowledge with diverse optical devices and components such as objectives, collimator, CGH, and relay optics, fibers, cameras, lasers and detectors
• Strong understanding in optics and physics enabling to analyze complex optical phenomena
• Proficiency in computing language such as Matlab, Python

Personal skills

• Proficiency in observing and responding to various scenarios and individuals, maintaining effective interactions throughout work
• Ability to learn and apply new information or skills.
• Strong customer focus and commitment to customer satisfaction through prioritization, quality, efficiency, and professionalism.
• Ability to complete assignments with attention to detail and high degree of accuracy.
• Ability to perform effectively in a demanding environment with changing workloads and deadlines.
• Result driven-demonstrate ownership and accountability.
• Identifies bottlenecks and drives improvements.
• Work independently or as part of a team and follow through on assignments with minimal supervision.
• Ability to establish and maintain cooperative working relationships with manager, co-workers, and customer.
• Be able to quickly acquire technical knowledge from documentation and on-the-job training and be capable of thoroughly investigating technical issues (analytically and hands-on in a lab).
• Strong communication and presentation skill. Must have capability to clearly communicate progress and status of assignments to colleagues, key stakeholder, managers via documents or presentations.

Experience

• Product development or research experience in high precision optics or optical module.
• Desired to have three to five years of professional experience in high end optical system development. Microscope experience is bonus.
• Experience in working with engineers across disciplines to solve complex problems in a timely manner.
• Experience in high precision optical tools' manufacturing is bonus, not mandatory.

Education

• Masters or PhD in Optical engineering (preferred) or Physics
• Highly desired to have strong background in following areas: Geometrical optics, Fourier optics, Lens design, Radiometry, Optical metrology, Illumination optics, Optical imaging system, Optical alignment, Polarization, Optical aberration

Minimum Qualifications

Doctorate (Academic) Degree and 0 years related work experience; Master's Level Degree and related work experience of 3 years; Bachelor's Level Degree and related work experience of 5 years

Base Pay Range: $114,100.00 - $194,000.00 Annually

Primary Location: USA-CA-Milpitas-KLA