nanochip fab solutions

APC Conference goes virtual and expands its scope to encompass evolving smart manufacturing and Industry 4.0 topics; premier technical forum now called the Advanced Process Control Smart Manufacturing (APCSM) Conference.

Since its founding in 1967, Applied Materials has been developing technologies that enable customers to build the world’s most-advanced semiconductor devices.

Given the complexity of Applied Materials equipment and spare parts there are plenty of physical and environmental packaging challenges. To address these, Applied has expanded its staff of packaging engineers, set up a lab, and worked with suppliers around the globe to align its packaging specifications with customer needs.

Semiconductor manufacturing over the past few decades has moved through several levels of technology, with each transition leading to lower costs and higher fab productivity. Now the industry is entering yet another change cycle, driven by increasing semiconductor quality requirements to meet the demands of IoT applications.

As semiconductor manufacturing moves into a “cyber-physical” era of smart manufacturing, providing data security in shared data environments such as cloud-based computing is proving to be an ongoing challenge.

Developing security standards so that data analysis experts can work together to solve thorny process control challenges remains a top priority as semiconductor manufacturing moves to a smart manufacturing model.

Leading conference on process control solutions for semiconductor and related high precision industries slated for San Antonio, Texas on October 28-31, 2019.

Manufacturers can turn periods of lower utilization to their benefit by using the available time to take proactive steps to increase the performance and productivity of their equipment and fab operations.

Compared with CMP for 300mm wafers, planarizing 200mm wafers with thick copper layers presented new challenges. Smaller polishing head zone sizes, much thicker bulk copper processes, and wafer edge issues added up to a demanding development process.

Factory automation increasingly depends on our ability to make complex decisions rapidly, but many semiconductor fabrication processes have exceeded the cognitive capabilities of humans to troubleshoot anomalies and assess all relevant variables. Thus, automation has become a key strategy used to address these challenges.