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
