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electronics The field of electronics is a branch of physics and electrical engineering that deals with the emission, behaviour and effects of electrons using electronic devices. Electronics uses active devices to control electron flow by amplification ...
, a wafer (also called a slice or substrate) is a thin slice of
semiconductor A semiconductor is a material which has an electrical conductivity value falling between that of a conductor, such as copper, and an insulator, such as glass. Its resistivity falls as its temperature rises; metals behave in the opposite way ...
, such as a crystalline silicon (c-Si), used for the fabrication of
integrated circuit An integrated circuit or monolithic integrated circuit (also referred to as an IC, a chip, or a microchip) is a set of electronic circuits on one small flat piece (or "chip") of semiconductor material, usually silicon. Large numbers of tiny ...
s and, in
photovoltaics Photovoltaics (PV) is the conversion of light into electricity using semiconducting materials that exhibit the photovoltaic effect, a phenomenon studied in physics, photochemistry, and electrochemistry. The photovoltaic effect is commercially ...
, to manufacture
solar cell A solar cell, or photovoltaic cell, is an electronic device that converts the energy of light directly into electricity by the photovoltaic effect, which is a physical and chemical phenomenon.
s. The wafer serves as the substrate for microelectronic devices built in and upon the wafer. It undergoes many
microfabrication Microfabrication is the process of fabricating miniature structures of micrometre scales and smaller. Historically, the earliest microfabrication processes were used for integrated circuit fabrication, also known as " semiconductor manufacturing ...
processes, such as doping, ion implantation, etching, thin-film deposition of various materials, and photolithographic patterning. Finally, the individual microcircuits are separated by wafer dicing and
packaged Packaging is the science, art and technology of enclosing or protecting products for distribution, storage, sale, and use. Packaging also refers to the process of designing, evaluating, and producing packages. Packaging can be described as a ...
as an integrated circuit.


History

In the semiconductor or silicon wafer industry, the term wafer appeared in the 1950s to describe a thin round slice of semiconductor material, typically germanium or silicon. Round shape comes from single-crystal ingots usually produced using the
Czochralski method The Czochralski method, also Czochralski technique or Czochralski process, is a method of crystal growth used to obtain single crystals of semiconductors (e.g. silicon, germanium and gallium arsenide), metals (e.g. palladium, platinum, silver, gol ...
. Silicon wafers were first introduced in the 1940s. By 1960, silicon wafers were being manufactured in the U.S. by companies such as MEMC/ SunEdison. In 1965, American engineers Eric O. Ernst, Donald J. Hurd, and Gerard Seeley, while working under IBM, filed Patent US3423629A for the first high-capacity epitaxial apparatus. Silicon wafers are made by companies such as Sumco, Shin-Etsu Chemical, Hemlock Semiconductor Corporation and Siltronic.


Production


Formation

Wafers are formed of highly pure,SemiSource 2006: A supplement to Semiconductor International. December 2005. Reference Section: ''How to Make a Chip.'' Adapted from Design News. Reed Electronics Group. nearly defect-free single crystalline material, with a purity of 99.9999999% ( 9N) or higher. One process for forming crystalline wafers is known as the
Czochralski method The Czochralski method, also Czochralski technique or Czochralski process, is a method of crystal growth used to obtain single crystals of semiconductors (e.g. silicon, germanium and gallium arsenide), metals (e.g. palladium, platinum, silver, gol ...
, invented by Polish chemist
Jan Czochralski Jan Czochralski ( , ; 23 October 1885 – 22 April 1953) was a Polish chemist who invented the Czochralski method, which is used for growing single crystals and in the production of semiconductor wafers. It is still used in over 90 percent of all ...
. In this process, a cylindrical ingot of high purity monocrystalline semiconductor, such as silicon or
germanium Germanium is a chemical element with the symbol Ge and atomic number 32. It is lustrous, hard-brittle, grayish-white and similar in appearance to silicon. It is a metalloid in the carbon group that is chemically similar to its group neighbors ...
, called a boule, is formed by pulling a seed crystal from a melt. Donor impurity atoms, such as boron or
phosphorus Phosphorus is a chemical element with the symbol P and atomic number 15. Elemental phosphorus exists in two major forms, white phosphorus and red phosphorus, but because it is highly reactive, phosphorus is never found as a free element on Ea ...
in the case of silicon, can be added to the molten intrinsic material in precise amounts in order to dope the crystal, thus changing it into an
extrinsic semiconductor An extrinsic semiconductor is one that has been '' doped''; during manufacture of the semiconductor crystal a trace element or chemical called a doping agent has been incorporated chemically into the crystal, for the purpose of giving it differe ...
of n-type or p-type. The boule is then sliced with a wafer saw (a type of wire saw), machined to improve flatness, chemically etched to remove crystal damage from machining steps and finally polished to form wafers. The size of wafers for photovoltaics is 100–200 mm square and the thickness is 100–500 μm. Electronics use wafer sizes from 100 to 450 mm diameter. The largest wafers made have a diameter of 450 mm, but are not yet in general use.


Cleaning, texturing and etching

Wafers are cleaned with
weak acid Acid strength is the tendency of an acid, symbolised by the chemical formula HA, to dissociate into a proton, H+, and an anion, A-. The dissociation of a strong acid in solution is effectively complete, except in its most concentrated solutions ...
s to remove unwanted particles. There are several standard cleaning procedures to make sure the surface of a silicon wafer contains no contamination. One of the most effective methods is
RCA clean The RCA clean is a standard set of wafer cleaning steps which need to be performed before high-temperature processing steps ( oxidation, diffusion, CVD) of silicon wafers in semiconductor manufacturing. Werner Kern developed the basic procedure ...
. When used for
solar cell A solar cell, or photovoltaic cell, is an electronic device that converts the energy of light directly into electricity by the photovoltaic effect, which is a physical and chemical phenomenon.
s, the wafers are textured to create a rough surface to increase surface area and so their efficiency. The generated PSG (
phosphosilicate glass Phosphosilicate glass, commonly referred to by the acronym PSG, is a silicate glass commonly used in semiconductor device fabrication for intermetal layers, i.e., insulating layers deposited between succeedingly higher metal or conducting layers, ...
) is removed from the edge of the wafer in the etching.


Wafer properties


Standard wafer sizes


Silicon

Silicon wafers are available in a variety of diameters from 25.4 mm (1 inch) to 300 mm (11.8 inches).
Semiconductor fabrication plant In the microelectronics industry, a semiconductor fabrication plant (commonly called a fab; sometimes foundry) is a factory where devices such as integrated circuits are manufactured. Fabs require many expensive devices to function. Estimates ...
s, colloquially known as ''fabs'', are defined by the diameter of wafers that they are tooled to produce. The diameter has gradually increased to improve throughput and reduce cost with the current state-of-the-art fab using , with a proposal to adopt .
Intel Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California. It is the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturer by revenue, and is one of the developers of the x86 ser ...
, TSMC and
Samsung The Samsung Group (or simply Samsung) ( ko, 삼성 ) is a South Korean multinational manufacturing conglomerate headquartered in Samsung Town, Seoul, South Korea. It comprises numerous affiliated businesses, most of them united under the ...
were separately conducting research to the advent of " prototype" (research) fabs, though serious hurdles remain. Wafers grown using materials other than silicon will have different thicknesses than a silicon wafer of the same diameter. Wafer thickness is determined by the
mechanical strength The field of strength of materials, also called mechanics of materials, typically refers to various methods of calculating the stresses and strains in structural members, such as beams, columns, and shafts. The methods employed to predict the re ...
of the material used; the wafer must be thick enough to support its own weight without cracking during handling. The tabulated thicknesses relate to when that process was introduced, and are not necessarily correct currently, for example the IBM BiCMOS7WL process is on 8-inch wafers, but these are only 200 μm thick. The weight of the wafer goes up along with its thickness and diameter.


Historical increases of wafer size

A unit of wafer fabrication step, such as an etch step, can produce more chips proportional to the increase in wafer area, while the cost of the unit fabrication step goes up more slowly than the wafer area. This was the cost basis for increasing wafer size. Conversion to 300 mm wafers from 200 mm wafers began in early 2000, and reduced the price per die for about 30–40%. Larger diameter wafers allow for more die per wafer.


Photovoltaic

M1 wafer size (156.75 mm) is in the process of being phased out in China as of 2020. Various nonstandard wafer sizes have arisen, so efforts to fully adopt the M10 standard (182 mm) are ongoing. Like other semiconductor fabrication processes, driving down costs has been the main driving factor for this attempted size increase, in spite of the differences in the manufacturing processes of different types of devices.


Crystalline orientation

Wafers are grown from crystal having a regular
crystal structure In crystallography, crystal structure is a description of the ordered arrangement of atoms, ions or molecules in a crystalline material. Ordered structures occur from the intrinsic nature of the constituent particles to form symmetric pattern ...
, with silicon having a diamond cubic structure with a lattice spacing of 5.430710 Å (0.5430710 nm). When cut into wafers, the surface is aligned in one of several relative directions known as crystal orientations. Orientation is defined by the Miller index with (100) or (111) faces being the most common for silicon. Orientation is important since many of a single crystal's structural and electronic properties are highly anisotropic. Ion implantation depths depend on the wafer's crystal orientation, since each direction offers distinct paths for transport. Wafer cleavage typically occurs only in a few well-defined directions. Scoring the wafer along cleavage planes allows it to be easily diced into individual chips ("
die Die, as a verb, refers to death, the cessation of life. Die may also refer to: Games * Die, singular of dice, small throwable objects used for producing random numbers Manufacturing * Die (integrated circuit), a rectangular piece of a semicondu ...
s") so that the billions of individual circuit elements on an average wafer can be separated into many individual circuits.


Crystallographic orientation notches

Wafers under 200 mm diameter have ''flats'' cut into one or more sides indicating the
crystallographic Crystallography is the experimental science of determining the arrangement of atoms in crystalline solids. Crystallography is a fundamental subject in the fields of materials science and solid-state physics (condensed matter physics). The wor ...
planes of the wafer (usually a face). In earlier-generation wafers a pair of flats at different angles additionally conveyed the doping type (see illustration for conventions). Wafers of 200 mm diameter and above use a single small notch to convey wafer orientation, with no visual indication of doping type. 450 mm wafers are notchless, relying on a laser scribed structure on the wafer surface for orientation.


Impurity doping

Silicon wafers are generally not 100% pure silicon, but are instead formed with an initial impurity doping concentration between 1013 and 1016 atoms per cm3 of boron,
phosphorus Phosphorus is a chemical element with the symbol P and atomic number 15. Elemental phosphorus exists in two major forms, white phosphorus and red phosphorus, but because it is highly reactive, phosphorus is never found as a free element on Ea ...
,
arsenic Arsenic is a chemical element with the symbol As and atomic number 33. Arsenic occurs in many minerals, usually in combination with sulfur and metals, but also as a pure elemental crystal. Arsenic is a metalloid. It has various allotropes, b ...
, or
antimony Antimony is a chemical element with the symbol Sb (from la, stibium) and atomic number 51. A lustrous gray metalloid, it is found in nature mainly as the sulfide mineral stibnite (Sb2S3). Antimony compounds have been known since ancient ti ...
which is added to the melt and defines the wafer as either bulk n-type or p-type. However, compared with single-crystal silicon's atomic density of 5×1022 atoms per cm3, this still gives a purity greater than 99.9999%. The wafers can also be initially provided with some interstitial oxygen concentration. Carbon and metallic contamination are kept to a minimum.
Transition metal In chemistry, a transition metal (or transition element) is a chemical element in the d-block of the periodic table (groups 3 to 12), though the elements of group 12 (and less often group 3) are sometimes excluded. They are the elements that can ...
s, in particular, must be kept below parts per billion concentrations for electronic applications.


450 mm wafers


Challenges

There is considerable resistance to the 450 mm transition despite the possible productivity improvement, because of concern about insufficient return on investment. There are also issues related to increased inter-die / edge-to-edge wafer variation and additional edge defects. 450mm wafers are expected to cost 4 times as much as 300mm wafers, and equipment costs are expected to rise by 20 to 50%. Higher cost semiconductor fabrication equipment for larger wafers increases the cost of 450 mm fabs (semiconductor fabrication facilities or factories). Lithographer Chris Mack claimed in 2012 that the overall price per die for 450 mm wafers would be reduced by only 10–20% compared to 300 mm wafers, because over 50% of total wafer processing costs are lithography-related. Converting to larger 450 mm wafers would reduce price per die only for process operations such as etch where cost is related to wafer count, not wafer area. Cost for processes such as lithography is proportional to wafer area, and larger wafers would not reduce the lithography contribution to die cost. Nikon planned to deliver 450-mm lithography equipment in 2015, with volume production in 2017. In November 2013 ASML paused development of 450-mm lithography equipment, citing uncertain timing of chipmaker demand. In 2012, a group consisting of
New York State New York, officially the State of New York, is a state in the Northeastern United States. It is often called New York State to distinguish it from its largest city, New York City. With a total area of , New York is the 27th-largest U.S. sta ...
( SUNY Poly/
College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering The College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering is the college of nanotechnology at the SUNY Polytechnic Institute campus in Albany, New York. Founded in 2004 and formerly a component of the University at Albany, SUNY, the college underwent rap ...
(CNSE)), Intel, TSMC, Samsung, IBM, Globalfoundries and Nikon companies has formed a public-private partnership called Global 450mm Consortium (G450C, similar to SEMATECH) who made a 5-year plan (expiring in 2016) to develop a "cost effective wafer fabrication infrastructure, equipment prototypes and tools to enable coordinated industry transition to 450mm wafer level". In the mid of 2014 CNSE has announced that it will reveal first fully patterned 450mm wafers at SEMICON West. In early 2017, the G450C began to dismantle its activities over 450mm wafer research due to undisclosed reasons. Various sources have speculated that demise of the group came after charges of bid rigging made against Alain E. Kaloyeros, who at the time was a chief executive at the SUNY Poly. The industry realization of the fact that the 300mm manufacturing optimization is more cheap than costly 450mm transition may also have played a role. The timeline for 450 mm has not been fixed. In 2012, it was expected that 450mm production would start in 2017, which never realized. Mark Durcan, then CEO of Micron Technology, said in February 2014 that he expects 450 mm adoption to be delayed indefinitely or discontinued. "I am not convinced that 450mm will ever happen but, to the extent that it does, it’s a long way out in the future. There is not a lot of necessity for Micron, at least over the next five years, to be spending a lot of money on 450mm." There is a lot of investment that needs to go on in the equipment community to make that happen. And the value at the end of the day – so that customers would buy that equipment – I think is dubious." As of March 2014, Intel Corporation expected 450 mm deployment by 2020 (by the end of this decade). Mark LaPedus of semiengineering.com reported in mid-2014 that chipmakers had delayed adoption of 450 mm "for the foreseeable future." According to this report some observers expected 2018 to 2020, while G. Dan Hutcheson, chief executive of VLSI Research, didn't see 450mm fabs moving into production until 2020 to 2025. The step up to 300 mm required major changes, with fully automated factories using 300 mm wafers versus barely automated factories for the 200 mm wafers, partly because a
FOUP FOUP is an acronym for Front Opening Unified Pod or Front Opening Universal Pod. It is a specialised plastic enclosure designed to hold silicon wafers securely and safely in a controlled environment, and to allow the wafers to be transferred bet ...
for 300 mm wafers weighs about 7.5 kilograms when loaded with 25 300 mm wafers where a SMIF weighs about 4.8 kilograms when loaded with 25 200 mm wafers, thus requiring twice the amount of physical strength from factory workers, and increasing fatigue. 300mm FOUPs have handles so that they can be still be moved by hand. 450mm FOUPs weigh 45 kilograms when loaded with 25 450 mm wafers, thus cranes are necessary to manually handle the FOUPs and handles are no longer present in the FOUP. FOUPs are moved around using material handling systems from Muratec or Daifuku. These major investments were undertaken in the economic downturn following the
dot-com bubble The dot-com bubble (dot-com boom, tech bubble, or the Internet bubble) was a stock market bubble in the late 1990s, a period of massive growth in the use and adoption of the Internet. Between 1995 and its peak in March 2000, the Nasdaq Comp ...
, resulting in huge resistance to upgrading to 450 mm by the original timeframe. On the ramp-up to 450 mm, the crystal ingots will be 3 times heavier (total weight a metric ton) and take 2–4 times longer to cool, and the process time will be double. All told, the development of 450 mm wafers requires significant engineering, time, and cost to overcome.


Analytical die count estimation

In order to minimize the cost per
die Die, as a verb, refers to death, the cessation of life. Die may also refer to: Games * Die, singular of dice, small throwable objects used for producing random numbers Manufacturing * Die (integrated circuit), a rectangular piece of a semicondu ...
, manufacturers wish to maximize the number of dies that can be made from a single wafer; dies always have a square or rectangular shape due to the constraint of wafer dicing. In general, this is a computationally complex problem with no analytical solution, dependent on both the area of the dies as well as their aspect ratio (square or rectangular) and other considerations such as the width of the scribeline or saw lane, and additional space occupied by alignment and test structures. Note that gross DPW formulas account only for wafer area that is lost because it cannot be used to make physically complete dies; gross DPW calculations do ''not'' account for yield loss due to defects or parametric issues. Nevertheless, the number of gross die per wafer (DPW) can be estimated starting with the first-order approximation or floor function of wafer-to-die area ratio, :DPW = \left\lfloor\frac\right\rfloor = \left\lfloor\frac\right\rfloor, where * d is the wafer diameter (typically in mm) * S the size of each die (mm2) including the width of the scribeline ( or in the case of a saw lane, the kerf plus a tolerance). This formula simply states that the number of dies which can fit on the wafer cannot exceed the area of the wafer divided by the area of each individual die. It will always overestimate the true best-case gross DPW, since it includes the area of partially patterned dies which do not fully lie on the wafer surface (see figure). These partially patterned dies don't represent complete ICs, so they cannot be sold as functional parts. Refinements of this simple formula typically add an edge correction, to account for partial dies on the edge, which in general will be more significant when the area of the die is large compared to the total area of the wafer. In the other limiting case (infinitesimally small dies or infinitely large wafers), the edge correction is negligible. The correction factor or correction term generally takes one of the forms cited by De Vries: :DPW = \frac - \frac (area ratio – circumference/(die diagonal length)) :or DPW = \left(\frac\right) \exp(-2 \sqrt/d) (area ratio scaled by an exponential factor) :or DPW = \frac \left(1 - \frac \right)^2 (area ratio scaled by a polynomial factor). Studies comparing these analytical formulas to brute-force computational results show that the formulas can be made more accurate, over practical ranges of die sizes and aspect ratios, by adjusting the coefficients of the corrections to values above or below unity, and by replacing the linear die dimension \sqrt with (H+W)/2 (average side length) in the case of dies with large aspect ratio: :DPW = \frac - 0.58^ \frac :or DPW = \left(\frac\right) \exp(-2.32^ \sqrt/d) :or DPW = \frac \left(1 - \frac \right)^2.


Compound semiconductors

While silicon is the prevalent material for wafers used in the electronics industry, other compound
III-V Semiconductor materials are nominally small band gap insulators. The defining property of a semiconductor material is that it can be compromised by doping it with impurities that alter its electronic properties in a controllable way. Because o ...
or II-VI materials have also been employed. Gallium arsenide (GaAs), a III-V semiconductor produced via the Czochralski method, gallium nitride (GaN) and silicon carbide (SiC) are also common wafer materials, with GaN and sapphire being extensively used in LED manufacturing.


See also

*
Die preparation Die preparation is a step of semiconductor device fabrication during which a wafer is prepared for IC packaging and IC testing. The process of die preparation typically consists of two steps: wafer mounting and wafer dicing. Wafer mounting Wa ...
* Epitaxial wafer * Epitaxy *
Klaiber's law {{distinguish, Kleiber's law Simply stated, Klaiber's law proposes that "''the silicon wafer size will dictate the largest diameter of ultrapure water supply piping needed within a semiconductor wafer factory.''" Ultrapure water (UPW) is used exte ...
* Monocrystalline silicon * Polycrystalline silicon * Rapid thermal processing *
RCA clean The RCA clean is a standard set of wafer cleaning steps which need to be performed before high-temperature processing steps ( oxidation, diffusion, CVD) of silicon wafers in semiconductor manufacturing. Werner Kern developed the basic procedure ...
*
SEMI font SEMI Font, also known as SEMI OCR font, is used for marking silicon wafers in the semi-conductor industry. The SEMI font character set Character encoding is the process of assigning numbers to graphical characters, especially the written cha ...
* Silicon on insulator (SOI) wafers *
Solar cell A solar cell, or photovoltaic cell, is an electronic device that converts the energy of light directly into electricity by the photovoltaic effect, which is a physical and chemical phenomenon.
* Solar panel *
Wafer bonding Wafer bonding is a packaging technology on wafer-level for the fabrication of microelectromechanical systems (MEMS), nanoelectromechanical systems (NEMS), microelectronics and optoelectronics, ensuring a mechanically stable and hermetically seal ...


References


External links


Evolution of the Silicon Wafer
by F450C -An infographic about the history of the silicon wafer. {{DEFAULTSORT:Wafer (Electronics) Semiconductor device fabrication