Abstract
Automation plays a critical role in the manufacturing of semiconductors. The
majority of modern semiconductor fabrication facilities, or fabs, manufacture
IC chips on circular silicon wafers with diameters of 150mm, or 6 inches, and
200mm, or 8 inches. More recently the industry has begun to adopt wafers with
diameter sizes of 300mm, or 12 inches. A production manufacturing batch or lot
for 150mm and 200mm wafer sizes consists of 25 wafers, contained in either an
open cassette or a fully enclosed pod called SMIF, or standard mechanical
interface. Production lots for 300mm manufacturing typically consist of 25
wafers contained in a FOUP, or front-opening unified pod. Both SMIF and FOUP
technologies isolate the wafers from their surroundings by creating an
ultra-clean "mini-environment" within the pod. One wafer may yield hundreds of
chips, and each chip may contain tens or hundreds of millions of microscopic
transistors in leading devices. Chips are used in a wide variety of
applications, ranging from complex logic and memory chips used in a broad
range of computers to application-specific integrated circuits, or ASICs, used
in automobiles and consumer products, to Digital Signal Processing (DSP) and
analog semiconductors used in the mobile Internet market such as for
color-screen multimedia cell phones.
| 
View Cart
