049 – Chip Production and Waferscanners
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In this episode we take a look at microchip production, with a special focus on waferscanners. To do this, we talked with Wilbert Albers of ASML, the leading waferscanner manufacturer in the world. In the episode, we talk about the overall chip production process (from silicon sand over wafer cutting to lithography and etching), and then we talk about the challenges of building high-precision, high-throughput waferscanners.
- ASML
- ASML TwinScan
- ASML PAS
- ASML eUV
- Zeiss Optics for Waferscanners
- Wafer
- Transmeta
- Integrated Circuit (IC)
- Transistor
- Semiconductor
- Mercury-vapor Lamp
- Excimer Laser
- Plasma Source
- Etching
- Hydraulics
- Linear Motor
- Antonie van Leeuwenhoek
- Diffraction
- Control Theory
- Interferometry
- Real-Time computing
- C
- Java
- Python
- Fab
- Foundry
- Metrology
- EUV
- Moore’s Law
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Auch wenn es eine “alte” Folge ist: sehr interessant, informativ und hat sogar auch einen gewissen Unterhaltungswert! :-)
Einen gut dazu passenden und ebenfalls sehr interessanten Artikel findet man hier:
http://www.heise.de/tp/artikel/36/36996/1.html
Danke und weiter so!
Werden wir probieren :-)
M.
Another good interview. I like the way you get down to the detail.
Thanks for the conversation, but for all I know:
Silicon is not basically sand. Sand is grains of silicates (mostly quartz), which is an oxide of silicon (SiO2). So they cannot “melt the sand, then grow a silicon crystal out of it”.
I quote techradar.com (http://www.techradar.com/news/computing-components/processors/how-sand-is-transformed-into-silicon-chips-599785):
“To get the silicon (purified), the oxygen is removed by mixing it with carbon and heating it in an electric arc furnace to temperatures beyond 2,000 degrees C. At those temperatures the carbon reacts with the oxygen, becoming carbon dioxide and leaving (almost) pure silicon in the bottom of the furnace. That silicon is then treated with oxygen to remove impurities such as calcium or aluminium, leaving what’s known as metallurgical grade silicon. That’s up to 99% pure. …”
The article goes on about how remaining aluminium, iron, boron, phosphorus, etc., which are also part of naturally occuring silicates) gets removed by in many further processing steps. Central to this refining is HCl, converting the impure silicon to trichlorsilane (HCl3Si), which is a liquid at room temperature, which in turn undergoes fractional destillation to get rid of the aluminiumchloride, ironchloride, boronchloride, etc. impurities …
Later on, the nearly-pure-enough silicon is molten, and via various methods, e.g. of zonal melting and recrystallization, remaining impurities get sort of pushed towards one end of the cylindrical silicon mono crystal. Only now that crystal can get sliced into wafers.
addendum:
I need to correct myself: in fact there are multiple steps of melting and recrystallization. The first of these (mentioned at the end of my previous post) does not yield monocrystalline silicon, but instead seems to create polycrystalline silicon, which appears to be of no use for integrated circuit production (though it is used for low efficiency polycrystalline solar panels); so further steps follow to obtain an actual Si mono crystal. I do not know where in this sequence zonal melting/recrystallization takes place.
Why are you playing a song in the middle of the episode? See 25 min to 29 min?