This section provides overview, applications, and principles of semiconductor inspection equipment. Also, please take a look at the list of 5 semiconductor inspection equipment manufacturers and their company rankings.
Table of Contents
The Semiconductor inspection equipment is a system that uses image processing to inspect wafers and semiconductor chips for defects during the semiconductor manufacturing process.
By introducing the Semiconductor inspection equipment into the semiconductor manufacturing process, it is possible to sort out defective products at an early stage, thereby reducing cost and improving quality and reliability.
The criteria you should consider whilst selecting a Semiconductor inspection equipment is the diameter of the wafer, the process to be used, and the type of defects to be detected.
Semiconductor inspection equipments are used at plants in the semiconductor manufacturing process to speed up and reduce the manpower required for inspections by automatically detecting defects.
Defects to be detected using a Semiconductor inspection equipments include wafer distortion, cracks, scratches, foreign matter adhesion, circuit pattern misalignment, dimensional defects, and package defects.
The appropriate Semiconductor inspection equipments and software should be selected for each process.
The Semiconductor inspection equipments consists of a device that processes the measured software data, and a system that performs the appropriate measurement.
High-resolution cameras, electron microscopes, and laser measuring instruments are used as measuring devices. Software to process the measured data is developed with various algorithms for each distributor and each process to be inspected.
The system for proper measurement includes vibration suppression and light shining devices.
The following sections describe the main inspection technologies for Semiconductor inspection equipments, which are imaging technology, image processing technology, and defect classification technology.
Wafer/defect inspection system is one of the semiconductor visual inspection systems, which mainly searches for defects in wafers. A wafer is a raw material for semiconductors, such as silicon, and is formed as a cylindrical monocrystalline material called an ingot, with a diameter existing from 5 cm to 30 cm and a thickness of The diameter of an ingot can range from 5 to 30 centimeters, and its thickness is about 1 millimeter. The size of the wafer allows for the deposition of a large number of IC chips, so the size of the wafer is increasing every year to improve the yield in productivity.
Wafer defects include foreign particles and pattern defects in the wafer, and the role of the wafer inspection system is to locate the positional coordinates of these defects. There are two main types of wafer defects: random and systematic. Random defects are mainly caused by foreign particles, but because they are random, their locations are unpredictable. Therefore, it is an important practical role of the wafer inspection system to identify random defects on the wafer by their positional coordinates.
Systematic defects, on the other hand, are defects caused by masks and exposure process conditions, and tend to occur at the same location within the entire circuit pattern of semiconductor device electronic circuits arranged on a wafer called a die. Wafer defect inspection systems are devices that detect these defects on wafers.
The semiconductor and inspection process is an essential and important quality control operation, or so-called QC process, in the semiconductor manufacturing process to prevent the outflow of defective semiconductors. Among all its manufacturing processes, the semiconductor and chip inspection process is the most important process because its chips are electric circuits with transistors and circuit wiring patterns formed on semiconductor wafers, which are called integrated circuits (IC) or large-scale integrated circuits (LSI), and are highly sophisticated and reliable. The semiconductor chip inspection process is one of the most important manufacturing processes in general, and includes the front-end process of manufacturing defect-free wafers, which are produced under advanced processing and clean environment control, and the back-end process of removing semiconductor chips from the wafers and placing them in resin modules. The inspection process involves a great deal of know-how and is a specialized and delicate work process.
The front-end process is wafer inspection. For wafer inspection, a wafer defect inspection system is used. Next, chips taken out from the finished wafer in the back-end process are fixed to a frame frame, wiring is connected using bonding wires, and components packaged in resin molds are subjected to electrical characteristic tests by applying temperature and voltage, and visual inspection is conducted using image inspection equipment and visual inspection to prevent the outflow of defective products. This process is the final inspection process for semiconductors.
*Including some distributors, etc.
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