Semiconductor industry applications

As a world leader in Fluorine chemistry, Honeywell has established a broad base of application specific products to enable the semiconductor industry to meet its technology roadmap. Most recently, we have announced the availability of a new line of wafer thinning materials which provide increased chip flexibility and reduced package size as well as increased thermal dissipation... 

The polymer, like many fluorine-containing polymers has very good weathering resistance and may also be used continuously up to 150°C. Outside of the electrical field it finds use in fluid handling, in hot water piping systems, in packaging and in chemical plant. A widely used specific application for PVDF is in ultra-pure water systems for the semiconductor industry. 

Like XPS, the application of AES has been very widespread, particularly in the earlier years of its existence more recently, the technique has been applied increasingly to those problem areas that need the high spatial resolution that AES can provide and XPS, currently, cannot. Because data acquisition in AES is faster than in XPS, it is also employed widely in routine quality control by surface analysis of random samples from production lines of for example, integrated circuits. In the semiconductor industry, in particular, SIMS is a competing method. Note that AES and XPS on the one hand and SIMS/SNMS on the other, both in depth-profiling mode, are complementary, the former gaining signal from the sputter-modified surface and the latter from the flux of sputtered particles. 

Some elements come in and out of fashion, so to speak. Sixty years ago, elemental silicon was a chemical curiosity. Today, ultrapure silicon has become the basis for the multibillion-dollar semiconductor industry. Lead, on the other hand, is an element moving in the other direction. A generation ago it was widely used to make paint pigments, plumbing connections, and gasoline additives. Today, because of the toxicity of lead compounds, all of these applications have been banned in the United States. 

Two maj or areas of application of CVD have rapidly developed in the last twenty years or so, namely in the semiconductor industry and in the so-called metallurgical-coating industry which includes cutting-tool fabrication. CVD technology isparticularly important in the production of semiconductors and related electronic components. Itisby far the most... 

Silicon dioxide (Si02), also known as silica, is a major industrial material with many applications particularly in the semiconductor industry in the form of coatings, which are produced mostly by CVD. It is an excellent electrical insulator with very low thermal expansion and good resistance to thermal shock. Its characteristics and properties are summarized in Table 11.4. 

Until about the 1970s, much of the CVD equipment for semiconductor applications was designed and built in-house and a CVD equipment industry was still embryonic. Since then, there has been a considerable shift to standardized systems built by specialized equipment manufacturers particularly for the semiconductor industry, and today sophisticated production and test equipment is readily available. 

Optoelectronics is a relatively new and fast-growing industry with many applications. Thin-film processes, such as reactive sputtering, molecular-beam epitaxy (MBE), and particularly MOCVD, play a major part in their production. Equipment and materials are similar to those used in the semiconductor industry and many companies manufacture both types of products. In fact the distinction between the two areas is often blurred. Statistics generally do not single out optoelectronics as such and, for that reason, it is difficult to define the scope of the industry accurately. 

The capability to control an excimer laser beam also is exploited in the semiconductor industry, where these lasers are used to etch elaborate features during the fabrication of semiconductor chips. Neil Bartlett probably never dreamed that his explorations of the chemistry of xenon would lead to such exotic applications. 

Semiconductor industry, vacuum chamber applications, clamp rings for gas plasma etching equipment, wafer retaining rings for gas plasma etching, vacuum tips. .. 

Wright of Advanced Micro Devices discusses the use of Raman microspectroscopy to measure the integrity of a film on semiconductor wafers during manufacture in US patent 6,509,201 and combined the results with other data for feed-forward process control [181]. Yield is improved by providing a tailored repair for each part. Hitachi has filed a Japanese patent application disclosing the use of Raman spectroscopy to determine the strain in silicon semiconductor substrates to aid manufacturing [182]. Raman spectroscopy has a well established place in the semiconductor industry for this and other applications [183]. 

Application of ICP-MS in geology and the semiconductor industry has been reviewed. The Li Li isotopic ratio of the stable lithium isotopes is an important parameter in geological and chemical studies. This ratio may be determined by thermal MS... 

The pumps of the DRYVAC family are the classic dry compressing claw vacuum pumps that are preferably used in the semiconductor industry, whereby the pumps need to meet a variety of special requirements. In semiconductor processes, as in many other vacuum applications, the formation of particles and dusts during the process and/or in the course of compressing the pumped substances to atmospheric pressure within the pump, is unavoidable. In the case of vacuum pumps operating on the claw principle it is possible to convey particles through the pump by means of so called pneumatic conveying". This prevents the deposition of particles and... 

Single crystals of high purity and defect free, may be needed for many applications, none more so than in the electronics and semiconductor industry. Various methods have been developed for preparing different crystalline forms such as large crystals, films, etc. A few of the important methods are described next. 

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