China’s first wafer regeneration plant goes into mass production

Chinese company Hefei Ultron Semiconductor Co has announced that it has carried out mass production at its silicon wafer regeneration facilities in eastern Hanui province. This is the first such facility to operate in China, enabling local semiconductor manufacturers to recover damaged or contaminated 12-inch wafers within the country’s borders. As reported by CnTechPost.

As with any manufacturing process, semiconductor manufacturing has deviations from established “perfect” production scenarios. Even in semiconductor manufacturing facilities, some of the most tightly controlled environments in the world, there’s still room for failure – whether it’s in the wafer-etching process that extracts the chips from the material. silicon raw material, or by using contaminated raw materials for the various stages of manufacture. Errors are costly here, and while some imperfections result in reduced yield (the percentage of usable and compliant silicon at the end of manufacturing), other errors – such as contamination or power outages – can waste companies thousands of dollars, setting aside months of painstaking manufacturing steps for a single silicon wafer.

Platelet regeneration is a catch-all term, referring to the processes that return contaminated and / or contaminated wafers to their original state, ready for another go-around in the manufacturing rooms. The process can be presented in different ways: such a process can be carried out in a three-stage pipeline, where diamond abrasive discs are used to grind the etched layers and remove structures from the wafer; a second chemically polishes the surface of the wafer to an impeccable state; and a final step chemically cleans the entire surface of the wafer. The regenerated wafers are then packaged and returned to the customer, who can then reinsert them into their manufacturing pipeline.

Hefei Ultron Semiconductor Co’s wafer regeneration facility now joins a limited number of such facilities around the world and will provide Chinese semiconductor manufacturers with an in-border partner – previously unusable wafers had to be sent to China. Japan to receive the same treatment. .

Construction of the plant began in March 2020 and the total investment was approximately $ 154 million. Hefei Ultron Semiconductor Co expects the facility to regenerate 1.68 million wafers per year, with additional capacity installed to clean other work pieces at a rate of 1.2 million per year.