The process is related to microelectronics - microchip manufacturing.
The purpose of the process is to create a SiO2 layer on the surface of a Si wafer.
Equipment: Vertical furnace to heat the wafers in the Q2 atmosphere and perform oxidation on the wafer surface.
Process: The oxidation occurs on the front side and the back side of the wafer: Si (wafer) + O2 (gas within the furnace) --> SiO2 (thin film layer on the wafer surface.
The process is performed in batches of up to 150 wafers in one run.
Requirements: Create a SiO2 thin layer with a certain thickness and low sigma - low standard deviation of the thickness between the wafers and within the wafer
Failure: Wafers from the lower zone have higher thickness and significantly higher within wafer sigma (standard deviation of the thickness within the wafer)
Important note: In order to achieve better thermal uniformity, the furnace is built of three heaters that are managed differently according to data from a certain thermocouple (TC).
The project aims to analyze the system and process using Process Functional Modeling (PFM), create a model of the process, create a model of the failure, and generate a solution.
Wet cleaning is widely used in microchip manufacturing. Single wafer equipment is working as follows. A wafer rotates, and chemistry is poured from a movable nozzle. Water rinsing is performed at the end of the process. Loading of a new batch of the chemistry resulted in excursion - a strongly increased amount of defects was observed on the wafer after the processing. The project is dedicated to the failure analysis and creation of innovative solutions.
The project was dedicated to production yield improvement in microchip manufacturing. The bumps are created on the top of a wafer and used for the final test of all dies. Only good dies are taken for the packaging. All dies that fail the test will be scrapped. The process yield depends on the amount of "good" and "bad" dies. It was revealed that in some cases, the time between the end of the process and the final test impacts the yield. The longer the dwelling, the more dies fail the final test. If the dwelling exceeds hundreds of hours, the amount of failed dies becomes dramatically high, which results in the scrapping of the whole wafer. The problem was analyzed and solved.
Flash heating of a wafer is widely used in microchip manufacturing. The purpose of the process is to prevent the diffusion of ions and atoms. During the flash process, a wafer breakage occurs. The project's purpose is to learn and understand the mechanism of the wafer breakage and propose the solutions to prevent the wafer breakage