A Century-Old Process Helping Semiconductors Get Cleaned Up
BY JAMES DETAR
INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY
Researchers have found a way to clean tiny particles from semiconductor wafers by using a 100-year-old process.
It could be a key breakthrough for the chip industry, which takes cleanliness very seriously. A speck that's invisible to the human eye can ruin a chip that costs hundreds of dollars. Chipmakers like Intel Corp. (INTC) spend millions of dollars every year making sure no particles touch the surface of their polished silicon platters.
A company called Phrasor Scientific Inc. is behind the new cleaning technology. The idea is to blast wafers with electrostatically charged water and some innocuous chemicals.
These droplets are powerful enough to dislodge the tiniest of particles, says Julius Perel, president and co-founder of the Duarte, Calif., company. And they don't just work on silicon wafers.
"It will clean almost anything you can put into a chamber and bombard," he said. Perel calls the process NanoClean.
It's a variation of a process used for more than 100 years. When certain liquids are electrically charged, they form tiny clusters of droplets. When forced through a nozzle, they come out with great force.
NASA has long used a similar process in spacecraft, Perel says, but not for cleaning. Tiny nozzles spray droplets to create jet propulsion. They're used to correct a vehicle's course.
Today, chipmakers put silicon wafers into special cleaning chambers. They bathe them with strong chemicals to remove tiny particles that could cause a glitch on a chip.
But they can't use these harsh chemicals while they're making the chips. That's the advantage of NanoClean, Perel says.
Phrasor is attracting attention. It's signed more than 20 contracts with federal agencies and tech companies, Perel says.
One early customer is Applied Precision LLC, located near Seattle. The company, which makes biotech and chip gear, was having problems cleaning the heads of probes used to test semiconductors.
Chemicals on silicon wafers would start to coat the probes. And as the tips of these probes are only about one-thousandth of an inch wide, chemicals can ruin them.
But now NanoClean takes the gunk off without harming the probes.
Phrasor gets research funding from the Swiss chip gear maker SEZ Holding AG.
SEZ could start putting NanoClean wafer cleaning parts onto its machines as early as the end of this year, Perel says.
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Katherine, just thought I'd post this FYI. |
