As feature sizes continue their frantic descent into the sub-0.6 pm region, wafer cleaning is on its way toward becoming a true enabling technology. Ridding wafers of the i r process chemicals is one of the most common steps in fabrication. It’s also, often a dirty one, in terms of picking up contaminants. The heavy metals, alkali metals and light elements, all common to wafer processing, also ...

Metal Deposition or metallization process is one of the processes in fabricating a wafer. A wafer is a thin slice of semiconductor material, such as a silicon crystal, used in the fabrication of integrated circuits and other micro-devices. Due to the nature on the process, it creates lot of particles, which would impact the next process if it were not removed. Particle deposition on the wafer s...

We describe and discuss near-field terahertz wave imaging with a dynamic aperture created on a semiconductor wafer. The spatial resolution of a near-field terahertz wave imaging system with a dynamic aperture created on a GaAs wafer is determined by the diameter of the gating-beam-induced thin photocarrier layer. With a dynamic aperture created on a GaAs wafer, we have achieved a subwavelength ...

New semiconductor wafer fabrication facilities use Front Opening Unified Pods (FOUPs) as a common unit of wafer transfer. Since the number of pods is limited due to high costs, and the increase in wafer size to 300-mm reduces the number of wafers required for a customer order, combining multiple orders into a single job is a necessity for efficient production. We investigate the multiple orders...

Computational techniques for representing and analyzing full wafer metrology data are developed for chemical vapor deposition and other thin-film processing applications. Spatially resolved measurement data are used to produce “virtual wafers” that are subsequently used to create response surface models for predicting the full-wafer thickness, composition, or any other property profile as a fun...

Three-dimensional (3D) packaging with through-silicon-vias (TSVs) is an emerging technology featuring smaller package size, higher interconnection density, and better performance; 2.5D packaging using silicon interposers with TSVs is an incremental step toward 3D packaging. Formation of TSVs and interconnection between chips and/or wafers are two key enabling technologies for 3D and 2.5D packag...

Widespread deployment of cameras in consumer products–most noticeably cell phones–has lead to a quest for improved cost efficiency in all manufacturing steps. Wafer-level manufacturing and assembly seems to offer a way forward for cost reduction. Whereas CMOS image sensors are already exclusively manufactured at the wafer level, this is not true for the lens stacks used in consumer cameras. The...

1 Introduction In the manufacturing of VLSI integrated circuits (ICs), it would be desirable that the ICs undergo an accurate test directly on the wafer, before they are cut and packaged. This would save the cost of bounding and packaging the faulty ICs, which may be a relatively large fraction. However, accurate testing on the wafer can hardly be supported by the consolidated technology of tes...