Semicon-World

The economy drives the market. Where there is demand, there will be someone supplying that demand. Industries exist to turn a profit due to that demand. The electronics industry is huge with so many competitors on every level, with so many products ranging from heavy appliances like air conditioners, refrigerators, washing machines, to small and sleek gadgets like smartphones, earbuds, smart watches and the like. All these electronic goods have a never ending demand, so much so that the industry is facing issues in meeting it. All of these appliances have one thing in common: they all run on semiconductors. "Well just make more semiconductor manufacturing plants", will be your first thought; if only it was that simple. The semiconductor industry manages to find itself in quite a unique position, the ecosystem surrounding it is a tremendous interdisciplinary and international achievement. The raw materials and equipment required for running one fabrication plant on a commercia...

Globalization has shaped our world and has created what we term as modern life. The import-export of goods and services across borders allow countries to fulfil their basic needs like food and fuel. Yet what happens when this balance is broken? The recent United States of America and Iran conflict is a textbook example. The blockade of one small channel of water called the Strait of Hormuz managed to raise oil prices by 20%. LPG shortage was felt the world over with households not receiving gas for cooking food. Hotels and restaurants had to stop serving some items or close down altogether. Another little industry being caught in the crossfire was the semiconductor industry, the same industry producing your mobile phones, laptops, televisions, solar panels, and all your day-to-day appliances. To begin with, let us be clear about the difference between LNG and LPG. Liquefied natural gas is methane stored in cryogenic conditions; the container is cooled to 167 degrees Celsius. Liquefied ...

Outsourced semiconductor assembly and testing (OSAT) facilities are popping up on the news quite frequently in recent times. The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology of India (MeitY) has approved, till publishing date, 8 packaging facilities. Heavyweights like Micron, HCL, Foxconn, and domestic companies like Continental Devices India Ltd. (CDIL) have invested a lot of money on these up and coming manufacturing plants. What are these facilities and what do they do? Let us dive into this question and come up with some answers. Figure 1: Description of semiconductor manufacturing flow. Semiconductor fabrication has two main fabrication areas; namely the front-end and the back-end. The frontend deals with manufacturing the circuits on the wafer. The processes that are covered here are: deposition , lithography , etching , chemical-mechanical polishing, and doping . The wafer remains intact in this stage and will be sent for packaging. This is where an assembly, testing, mark...

Beginner's introduction to etching. To lay underground cables, pipes, building foundations, and other such structures, we need to dig the ground up and then lay them below the surface. A loose connection during laying can mean either digging up the place again, or in the case of building foundation, keep reinforcing the structure to keep it from falling. A well dug-in pipe or a cable can last for a very long time. A strong foundation makes for a sturdy building. Etching aids in the formation of lasting layers of a semiconductor device. Figure 1: Location of etching in process flow. Etching is the process of removing unwanted material from the substrate. There are some portions that need insulation in a conductive layer and some places which may require conductive material deposited into an insulating layer. Removing that part and subsequently depositing the required material is where it finds its use. For all of our life on this planet, you can only exist in two states: wet or d...

Starter's first deposition. Construction is something that everyone of you has witnessed time and time again. Most of these buildings are made of brick and concrete. Concrete acts as the adhesive, joining the bricks together. Deposition is the construction of semiconductor manufacturing. Basic understanding of it is constructing thin films by laying atoms on a substrate. Atoms are the bricks and the bond between the atoms is the concrete. Figure 1: Location of deposition in the process flow. This topic is an absolute mammoth to cover due to the number of techniques and materials that can be laid on top of one another in such a minuscule scale. The huge range and properties of materials, whether they be elements or compounds, calls for multiple processing procedures. One technique may work for one material and may completely fail for the other one just due to a difference in melting point. There are three basic deposition principles: physical deposition, chemical deposition, and...

The beginner's post for doping. The first thing in your mind was probably the infamous incident of Lance Armstrong being caught using performance enhancing drugs during the Tour-de-France. Using these sorts of drugs is completely banned in sports and to enforce this the World Anti-Doping Agency was founded. In the context of semiconductors; doping is one of the most useful processes invented and has been utterly crucial in shaping the digital age. Let me ask you a question, what is a semiconductor? It is a material with its conductivity value in between conductors (like copper, aluminum, and other metals) and insulators (like glass, PVC, ceramic, etc.). By definition, it seems like a pretty useless material. It is an inferior conductor and an insulator. Yet, the world runs on this stuff. Why is this the case? The main property of a semiconductor is that we can change its conductivity by either optical or thermal excitation (heating or shining a light), or by doping. It follows ...

Here begins the beginner's guide to lithography. Yes, that is what the name means if you separate ‘litho’ and ‘graphy’. Doesn’t seem that scary now does it? The name is very literal to the process conducted. The rock in question is our silicon wafer and we create patterns on it for further processing. It is a very crucial process as it directly determines the transistor density which is directly proportional to the amount of data it can process at a time. Patterns are either printed or written on the wafer. Let us go through the process step by step. Figure 1: Process of lithography. First, we coat the wafer in a liquid state compound called photoresist. As the name suggests, this compound changes its properties when light is shined on it. The wafer is then spun around for a determined time and rotations per minute to ensure uniform coating. The same way we use our handheld utensil (I don’t know what you use) to evenly coat bread with butter or jam so that we get every flavored b...