The Carriage of the Wafer Front End and Wafer Cassette Mapping in the Semiconductor Industry

The semiconductor industry is improving daily, either for the production equipment manufacturers or the end-users. In fact, the transistors in the integrated circuit are getting increased along with the performance. It is also due to the change in the structure of the silicon plates are turning out to be a lot more complicated and getting delicate and comfortable. It makes the manufacturing process to turn out to be a lot more expensive.

We all know how steadily the cost for the state of the art manufacturing equipment is rising exponentially. The retail price of these chips is Since the gap between the wafers, which are stacked in the FOUP, is only very few millimeters thin, t also decreasing at some verge.

Every semiconductor manufacturing company has a certain thing in mind, and that is to increase the yield of efficiency and the yield while also minimizing the throughput time at the same time. You know the semiconductor manufacturing facilities are automated in high tech environments, and it includes material handling.

To increase the production volume and throughput, handling of the speed keeps importance. The risks of dividing the wafers while transferring from the FOUP to process the chamber should be kept as little as possible. It is not an easy task while considering that the wafer is extra fragile and less than 1mm wide disk. No one can perform the wafers’ handling and transfer in the fastest possible way with making them more accurate, reliable, and tireless than the robot.

You must know that the wafer front end’s movement in the semiconductor manufacturing can be obtained with the wafer handling robots’ help. The wafer handling automation is entirely based on the compliance arm for the robot assembly. The SCARA wafer handling robots gets processed in the horizontal work plane and the vertical work plane in 1DOF and 3DOF. So, these wafer handling robots carry the throughputs of up to 350 wafers per hour with the considerable positioning repeatability of 100 um.

Why is Wafer Cassette Mapping critical?

The wafers are placed with certain positions in the FOUP. There are some cases when the wafer in the FOUP is cross-slotted or, say, double stuffed.

If the robots don’t detect this, it will produce more wafers that further cause broken wafers. The broken wafers make the machine downtime as well as losses. Therefore, it is to identify potential loading faults.

The wafer cassettes are mainly used for storing purposes and transport the wafers in the semiconductor manufacturing working process.

The wafer cassettes are mostly known as the wafer carriers for many people. These are specially crafted to carry several wafers of equivalent sizes.

The process of the Wafer Cassette Mapping:

There are wafer end effectors at the end of the robot arm that is responsible for the wafer handling. The end effectors will go beneath the FOUP so that the wafer would interrupt the mapping sensor beam. Further, the wafers are countable too and can be moved up and down all the way if they are not placed accurately.

As there is a gap between the wafers and stacked in the FOUP is very few millimeters thin. Reluctantly, the whole end effectors might be delicate. It needs the wafer mapping sensor at the blade end to be as thin and light as much as possible.