Semiconductor Manufacturing:

A Brief Introduction for a Non-Technical Audience

With Genus' core products and customers in the semiconductor manufacturing industry, a basic understanding of this industry is helpful for potential investors and shareholders. A very fundamental outline of semiconductors and manufacturing is provided below.

Semiconductors (Silicon is the "steel" of the semiconductor industry)

Silicon, a common substance found in beach sand, is a so-called semiconductor, because it is neither entirely insulative nor conductive, but semi-conductive of electrical currents. Silicon is great for making computer chips because its electric charge can easily be altered (doped) in different areas to become either more conductive or less so. Moreover, silicon can withstand the extreme heat and many chemical treatments that are used to build the tiny electronic circuits onto the silicon. Wafers made of silicon serve as the substrate into which various materials are implanted and onto which thin layers of materials are deposited and etched to form complex electrical circuits. Multiple computer chips are produced on a single silicon wafer. The cost-effective goal for manufacturers is to fit as many identical dice (chips, singular -- die) as possible onto one wafer. That is why wafers have been getting larger over the years. Today, chip manufacturers are starting to build fabrication facilities for wafers that are 300mm in diameter, moving up from the 200mm wafers that have been used over the past years.

Chip-Making Fabs (Bigger wafers, smaller components)

A wafer "fab" is the production facility of major semiconductor manufacturers. A fab may be, typically, the size of a football field, and contains many machines from many different industry suppliers, all housed in immaculate "clean rooms." With the industry moving to 300mm wafers, manufacturers will need to update their equipment by purchasing 300mm processing equipment from suppliers like Genus, to replace the 200mm equipment.

Hundreds of processing steps are required to produce the tiny integrated circuits that constitute data processing logic chips (microprocessors) and memory chips (DRAM) for today’s electronic products. The processes performed on the silicon wafer include ion implanting (doping), thermal processing, photo-resist application, photolithography, etching, chemical vapor deposition, cleaning, dicing, die and wire bonding and testing. Some of the steps are repeated several times during the production. After a silicon wafer has been processed and tested, the chips on it are carefully sliced into individual die, then packaged, mounted, and wired onto a circuit board for PCs or installed into many other kinds of appliances or electronic devices. By itself, a single chip, or integrated circuit, is often as small as a human thumbnail.

Unbelievable Scale Using Thin Films

How do they make the complex circuitry so small that the human eye may not actually see it on the chip? One critical process is the deposition of thin films of insulating or conducting materials which build the components or features within the circuit design. Genus offers two key thin film categories among its product offerings: chemical vapor deposition (CVD) systems and atomic layer deposition (ALD) systems. ALD is a sort of subset of the CVD process and is considered a next-generation technology because it offers an unprecedented level of control at the atomic level. See more discussion of Genus product offerings ( CVD or ALD ). For analogies of micro-scales, see Nano-measurements

Basic Electronics

To understand ALD processes in semiconductor fabrication, it also helps to have knowledge of basic electronics. Electrical circuits comprise capacitors, resistors, diodes and transistors. Building these basic structures that carry or control the electrical current requires the use of very small, precise and yet fully functional metals (conductors) and dielectrics (insulators). Consult our web-site Glossary for descriptions of these electronic components.

Ever Increasing Processing Speed — Moore’s Law

As the race for ever-increasing processing speeds continues, the demand for ultra-thin films increases as well. Improved speed for processing chips is achieved by building smaller scale and denser feature components on the chips, and building with new materials. Genus offers equipment and materials that enable the scaling down of technology which is vital to the ongoing race for speed.