Jay Cech

Finer traces need flatter wafers. MTI by Vitrek products can help get you there. They exceed all the prevailing tolerance standards to deliver optimal performance. Learn more. https://bit.ly/4bIS8vm #semiconductor #semiconductors #fabrication #inspection #measurement #whitepaper

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Finer traces need flatter wafers. MTI by Vitrek products can help get you there. They exceed all the prevailing tolerance standards to deliver optimal performance. Learn more. https://bit.ly/4bIS8vm #semiconductor #semiconductors #fabrication #inspection #measurement #whitepaper

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Are you looking to boost your semiconductor wafer manufacturing yield? Don’t miss this insightful webinar led by industry experts Brian Rudary and Doug Nordstrom! In this session, you’ll learn how to: ·        Optimize your thermal loop system ·        Select the right components ·        Ensure proper installation ·        Conduct performance testing Unlock the secrets to enhancing your manufacturing process and achieving higher yields. Webinar link: https://lnkd.in/gqQaKBte ----- If you have any questions about our products and services, please contact our hotline at 0936420804 or email us at sales@swagelok.com.vn. #Semiconductor #Manufacturing #Webinar #ThermalManagement #IndustryExperts #Swagelokvietnam #IncreaseYield

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💥 "Eventually the numbers will confess the truth" 💥 Ninad Singh teases this truth from Andy Mattes. (about 6:30) Further, love the discussion at ≈26:00 on adopting an activist investor mentality in your own business. Do you have to execute everything to the degree they might? Of course not. But what a great thought exercise to identify opportunities! For middle-market industrial manufacturers looking for a simple place to start - contrast the rigor, process engineering and continuous improvement methodology you routinely apply to production and operations, with a very different and far more casual ad hoc approach to most marketing and sales. Is your #SalesProcess anywhere near as carefully engineered, routinely optimized, and consistently measured as others in your company with less impact? Probably not! Whether you ever consider your return on equity and exit options or not, why not optimize the business for the right blend of lifestyle and efficiency? Btw, also some great implicit insight into differences in management mindset between Germany and the US. Might be of interest to members of GACC South - German American Chamber of Commerce of the Southern U.S., Inc. and GACC Midwest - German American Chamber of Commerce of the Midwest, Inc. h/t Gaurav Batra

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What is Wafer Dicing? 💎 In semiconductor fabrication, wafer dicing (or die singulation) is an important step. Here's how it works: Methods of Dicing: - Scribing and Breaking: Like with a sheet of cardboard, predefined lines on the wafer create breaking points for separation. - Mechanical Sawing: High-speed (up to 30,000 RPM) diamond-tip blades cut wafers. - Laser Cutting: Laser beams create fine cuts along the intended separation lines. Laser dicing offers flexibility in die shape and is especially useful for delicate materials. - Plasma Dicing: This method uses reactive plasma to etch the wafer along pre-defined paths. It’s highly precise and can handle very thin wafers without causing mechanical damage. Precision: - Wafers are mounted on dicing tape, holding them on a thin sheet metal frame during the process. Die Streets and Shapes: - The areas cut away during dicing are called die streets, typically about 75 micrometers wide. - Dies can be rectangular, square, or other shapes, depending on the method used. Some advanced laser dicers can create custom shapes. Materials Diced: - Not limited to silicon. - Used for glass, ceramics, and more. Engineering Challenges: - Achieving sub-micron precision. - Ensuring minimal damage to the wafer and dies. - Debris control, contaminants can affect die performance and reliability. - Efficient heat dissipation. - Dicing thin wafers without breakage or warping. - Balancing speed with precision and quality control. - Maintaining dicing equipment can be expensive. Looking for more insight into dicing technology and opportunities to work in this sector? Contact us at Delve Search - Global Search Consultants. In search of a dicing equipment professional for your team? Contact me at Claas Ole Köhler.

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2024 Wafer Fab Equipment revenue will remain stable before a 2025 surge Wafer Fab Equipment (WFE) revenue is estimated to increase in 2024 by +1.3% year-on-year (YoY) to $108.1B. This is due to a WFE expenditure increase across advanced logic as well as #NAND and #DRAM memory, while legacy node investment is robust. Stronger 2024 growth in service and support revenue is expected, at + 6%YoY to $23.5B, due to increasing fab utilization rates worldwide. In the long term, WFE revenue is expected to have a +4.3% CAGR24-29, reaching $133.7B in 2029, while service and support revenue will be $27.6B in 2029, at a +3.3%CAGR24-29. The moderate growth rate is due to the large WFE revenue increase in 2021-2022, which is related to the large demand for semiconductor devices. As device revenue declined in 2023, the ratio of WFE revenue as a % of semiconductor device revenue reached as high as 19%. In particular, investments in Greater #China (domestic and foreign) ensured the overall WFE did not decline in 2023, and similar investment levels should continue in 2024. However, such high #investments by #chipmakers will not be sustainable in the long term and are expected to decline slowly due to continuous WFE buyouts, with capacity exceeding production needs, governmental incentives, and general increases in chip production costs. Thanks again to Yole Group for the full article with more background and insights via the link below 💡🙏👇 https://lnkd.in/ejy-Ve2k #semiconductorindustry #semiconductors #semiconductor #technology #tech #it #innovation #chip #chips #foundry #geopolitics #ic #ai #iot #ml #informationtechnology #datacenter #computer #hpc #data #cloud

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Need for advanced packaging material overhaul due to chiplets and multi-dies: "Glass has been discussed as a replacement material for silicon and organic substrates for more than a decade, primarily in multi-die packages. .. In addition, large foundries and OSATs already have made significant investments in other materials, such as copper clad laminates. Those are field-proven as a base material in PCBs, but they will run out of steam when the packaging industry gets down below 2/2nm lines/spaces. Shifting to glass requires a whole new round of equipment investments and new processes, or some way to combine it with existing processes. .. One of glass’ most attractive features is its low dielectric constant, minimizing signal propagation delays and crosstalk between adjacent interconnects, which is crucial for high-speed electronics. It also reduces the capacitance between interconnects, allowing for faster signal transmission and improved overall performance. In applications such as data centers, telecommunications, and high-performance computing, where speed is of the essence, the use of glass substrates can significantly enhance system efficiency and data throughput. The low dielectric constant also enables better impedance control, ensuring signal integrity across the entire circuit. This is particularly attractive in RF applications, where impedance matching is essential for maximizing power transfer and minimizing signal loss. By providing consistent electrical properties across the substrate surface, glass substrates facilitate the design and fabrication of high-frequency circuits with enhanced reliability and performance. Another key advantage of glass substrates is exceptional thermal stability, which plays a vital role in maintaining device performance under fluctuating thermal conditions. Unlike copper-clad laminate, which can deform or delaminate under thermal stress, glass substrates exhibit minimal dimensional changes over a wide temperature range."

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Downtime is a no no for semiconductor fabs. Even a brief interruption can result in significant financial losses and disruptions in production. In this article, we explain how a linear actuator's built-in precision and reliability can simplify and even improve the design of wafer processing machinery, such as a silicon wafer pin lift. 📓 Redefining Precision and Reliability for Wafer Pin Lifters https://hubs.li/Q02rnWbj0 #alphastep #motioncontrol #semicon #Engnotes

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I’m excited to be the new owner of a state of the art molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) system currently set up for epitaxial Ga/Mn/As/Ge heterostructure growth .. I’ll be installing this bad boy in my old Virginia Cleanroom fab near Virginia Tech where I started my first silicon micro-machining and thin films company 30 years ago in a burnt down church- ACT MicroDevices. The clean room there never had such good company as this guy. I spent my first decade there (and at its sister facilities with our growth) working on silicon micro machining and micro optics for hybrid optoelectronics and their packaging - esp for integrated optics and advanced fiber optic applications like laser die wafer level hermetic packaging. In one project - I multilayer AR coated over 2 million sub millimeter discrete precision micro-optics for Lucent for fiber optic backhaul networks - for their “Laser 2000” program - a SiOB based laser transmitter. I ran it in a LPVCD tube furnace I modified. This ended up being the most profitable job I ever did though I bid it at cost to win the project. I was able to transition from 10k lenses in a batch to 60k in a batch in less than a year. Due to careful engineering of the coating layer stresses we ended up becoming their sole source at ~20 cents per lens. Why did coating stress engineering matter? This is because with sub-mm lenses on SiOB platforms you can’t use epoxy - they were solid state bonded to 3um Al deposited in a <111> inverted pyramid in the silicon chip at the 4 tangential contact points- the final layer compressive was key to high shear. Ok - Back to the “why” on the heteroepitaxial growth… high delta N ridge waveguide SOI integrated optics were always held back by needing to hybridly integrate lasers and detectors (Intel)… meanwhile GaAs / InP were just too expensive and fragile for complex and large integrated optical systems. Enter recently a new pioneer: heteroepitaxial Ge on Sapphire https://lnkd.in/gschJcuB follow by direct active layers … I’m now thinking -as the Mandalorian says -“this is the way” :) viz: Integated Microwave Photonic Circuits See: “Integrated microwave photonics” Nature Photonics volume 13, pages 80–90 (2019) https://lnkd.in/gAhxui35 For me - a marriage of my first love in optoelectonics (Si-Pak) with my second - advanced microwave/mm-wave circuits (PolyStrata) into something new, far smaller, more integrated and faster. Who wants to collaborate? I haven’t worked with big UHV ion pumps on MBE since high-school when I brought them home from the local tech junkyard with ln2 “sorption” pumps to rough your UHV chamber .. I always thought it was cool that you could use diminishing pump discharge current to measure your UHV degree of success - something that takes less energy the better it gets! What else takes less energy the better it gets 🤔 Photo of my new system below from the manufacturer. (racks of controllers not shown).

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Exciting developments in the #semiconductor market are driving the need for optimized processes to increase chip output. Join our upcoming webinar with Brian Rudary and Doug Nordstrom to learn how to maximize yield in wafer manufacturing through efficient thermal management. Secure your spot now! https://bit.ly/45mB6Rr #SemiconductorManufacturing #ThermalManagement

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Curious about the biggest challenge engineers face when dealing with obsolete components? Listen in as Dr. Bill Bradford, President of Flip Electronics, and Duker Dapper, VP and GM of Resurgent Manufacturing Services, explain this and more in the latest Electropages podcast. From navigating tough decisions to sustaining semiconductor lifecycles, discover insights driving industry resilience by listening to the full episode: https://lnkd.in/eweDyPkk

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https://lnkd.in/ethDyF98 Anis Rahman Chief Technology Officer, President Applied Research & Photonics, Inc. Harrisburg, PA, United States Silicon carbide (SiC) is an important semiconductor for high temperature and high voltage applications such as in electric vehicles. The SiC boule is grown by seeded sublimation deposition process where the primary ingredients viz. carbon (C) and silicon (Si) are sublimated at very high temperature. Eddy and Gaskill [1] indicated that the variations in the atomic ratio of Si to C in the vapor phase that arise from feedstock granularity is difficult to minimize during growth. It is also difficult to avoid impurities arising from both in the SiC feedstock and in the graphite-insulation used in the growth reactor. Additionally, radial, and axial thermal profiles in the reactor and boule may cause polycrystallinity, grain boundary formation, and other defects in the lattice, which may lead to macro- and micro-domain formation. Because the understanding of materials’ properties at the extreme growth temperature of ~2200°C is incomplete, the boule growth modeling efforts are based on extrapolated parameters. Thus, an accurate experimental quantification is very important. The evolution of domain walls in single crystalline SiC is therefore very difficult to eliminate, and they stay put in the boule. This paper investigates SiC substrates and epitaxial SiC wafers via cameraless T-ray imaging route. T-ray images reveal significant features that were not seen before. “Dendrimer dipole excitation (DDE)” T-ray source was used that generates wider terahertz bandwidth (0.1 THz to ~30 THz) and generate >200 milliwatts of CW power without requiring a femto-second pulsed laser. An instrument system, the T-ray nanoscanning and 3D imager (TN3DI), has been designed around the DDE T-ray source that was used for the present investigations. Here the wafer was directly mounted on the nanoscanner and the whole wafer was scanned for imaging. T-ray images (see Fig. 1) have revealed some patterns in the SiC wafers of the present investigation that were unseen previously. Optical images and T-ray images were compared side-by-side that shows that the T-ray exhibits higher sensitivity and clearer images thus reveals internal intricate pattern not visible by the optical and X-ray technique. Here, we propose that the unique patterns observed from the T-ray images are due to some kind of domain formation in the boule that has remained in the wafers even after slicing and polishing. This hypothesis is further strengthened via T-ray micrograph of different wafers that exhibit many micro-domains on the epi layer of a 100 mm SiC wafer. Thus, the T-ray images have revealed some intricate patterns for the first time that are present in the SiC wafers. Details of the principle and experimental will be presented.

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Each new node brings more complex design rules and device models - too much for design teams to fully leverage alone. Instead, they must align closely with foundries and EDA partners.

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A proactive approach in semiconductor testing known as “shift left” is making waves. Identifying bugs early in the design process leads to smoother designs, enhanced debugging, and faster iterations. Dive into Murray Slovick’s latest MarketEYE article to see how this method is improving quality in semiconductor development: https://bit.ly/48o1Th5 #TTIinc #semiconductor #supplychain #manufacturing

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