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1988
Conference Paper
Titel
Flexible photolithographic process center
Abstract
The reduction of particulate contamination and process stability are important conditions. Production environments with clean room classes better than 10 are no longer achievable with manual wafer handling by the operator in the wafer fab. Parallel to this development the demands for flexible semiconductor equipment will grow considerably in future. By a free and flexible configuration of process steps it should be possible to work on small batch sizes of chips without the necessity of changing too much within the system. One solution being applied at present by almost every manufacturer of semiconductors or equipment consists of replacing manual handling by automated handling systems. In this discourse material flow concepts available today or in future are introduced and discussed. A wafer flow through typical process steps is taken as example to analyse transport and handling systems for inner cell transport and for inner equipment handling and transport. Inner cell transport cell o ne manufacturing cell to another complete the material flow studies. Present development projects show application of automated transport and handling systems in combination with portable local clean rooms and a modular flexible manfucaturing cell for fotolithography. The entire system as well as the modular units necessary for wafer processing, characterized by their total separation from the operator and their micro environmental conditioning. (IPA)
Language
English