IC FABRICATION

Wafer Preparation
What is a wafer?
Integrated Circuit
-

sometimes called chip or microchip

semiconductor
wafer
on
which
thousands or millions of tiny resistors,
capacitors, and transistors are fabricated
extremely small electronics can perform
calculations and store data using digital
or analog technology

Brief History
1947 Bardeen and Brattain and Shockley
succeeded in creating an amplifying
circuit utilizing a point-contact "transfer
resistance" device that later became
known as a transistor
1958 Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments had
built a simple oscillator IC with five
integrated
components
(resistors,
capacitors, distributed capacitors and
transistors)
1959 Robert Noyce of Fairchild Semiconductor
had the idea to evaporate a thin metal
layer over the circuits created by
Hoerni's process, inventing Planar
Technology
1965 Gordon Moore observed that the number
of components per IC double every year,
leading him to Moores Law, which was
later amended to the number of
components per IC doubles every 18
months
1971 The first commercially successful
microprocessor was invented

Processes in IC Fabrication

Wafer preparation
Photolithography
Etching
Thermal and Local Oxidation
Dopant Diffusion and Ion Implantation
Deposition
Patterning
Scribing and cleaving

Also called a slice or substrate

a thin slice of semiconductor material,
such as a silicon crystal, used in the
fabrication of integrated circuits and
other microdevices
serves as the substrate for most
microelectronic circuits and goes
through many processes, such as
doping, implantation and etching,
before the final product of an integrated
circuit is completed

Wafer Preparation Processes

1. Crystal Growth
2. Wafer Slicing/Sawing

Crystal Growth
Once silicon is extracted from sand, it needs
to be purified before it can be put to use.
First, it is heated until it melts into a highpurity liquid then solidified into a silicon
rod, or ingot, using common growing
methods like the Czochralski Method and
Float Zone Process.
The Czochralski method (CZ) uses a
small piece of solid silicon (seed) which is
placed in a bath of molten silicon, or
polycrystalline silicon, and then slowly
pulled (1 m/hr) in rotation (1/2 rps) as the
liquid grows into a cylindrical ingot.

The basic idea in Float Zone (FZ) crystal

growth is to move a liquid zone through the
material. If properly seeded, a single crystal
may result. The melt never comes into
contact with anything but the inert
atmosphere of the furnace. The maximum
diameter of the FZ grown crystals is about
20 mm.

characteristic notch or a flat in order to define

the proper orientation of the future wafer versus
a particular crystallographic axis.
Wafer shaping involves a series of precise
mechanical and chemical process steps that are
necessary to turn the ingot segment into a
functional wafer. Ingots are then sawed into the
wafers approximately 1 mm thick using a
diamond tipped saw.

However, a newer state of the art slicing

technology is used known as Multi-Wire Sawing
(MWS). Here, a thin wire is arranged over
cylindrical spools so that hundreds of parallel
wire segments simultaneously travel through the
ingot. While the saw as a whole slowly moves
through the ingot, the individual wire segments
conduct a translational motion always bringing
fresh
wire into contact with the
silicon. The wafers are then

cleaned
complex
Wafer Slicing
Ingots coming from crystal growing are slightly
over-sized in diameter and typically not perfectly
round. Hence, a machine employing a
grindwheel shapes the ingot to the precision
needed for wafer diameter control. Other
grinding wheels are then used to carve a

Polished wafers

polishing processes.

and
undergoes