KATHMANDU UNIVERSITY

SCHOOL OF ENGINEERING
DEPARTMENT OF MECHANICAL ENGINEERING

MINI PROJECT REPORT ON

ADVANCED MANUFACTURING ON MANUFACTURING OF

SEMICONDUCTOR CHIPS

Submitted To:
Mr. Biraj Singh Thapa

Submitted By:

Prashil Raj Shrestha (32112)

Roll: 57

JULY 2017
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

First of all, I am very pleased to conduct the project on “Advanced Manufacturing on

Manufacturing of Semiconductor Chips”. I would like to thank my course instructor,
Mr. Biraj Singh Thapa for his idea of this mini project which has become a great help
for us to research on the various innovations, and methods of advanced manufacturing.
This project has helped us to know various things except the course in the field of
advanced manufacturing.
 ABSTRACT

Semiconductor Chips are one of the most widely used tools in every sector of the present
world. From calculating, playing games, solving complex problems, cutting metal to
cutting tissue computer is used. Every digital device we use nowadays have a processing
unit to perform its operations.
 TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION .......................................................................................................... 1
1.1 Background: ......................................................................................................... 1
1.2 Objective: ............................................................................................................. 1
Discussion....................................................................................................................... 2
2.1 Semiconductor Chips: .......................................................................................... 2
2.2 Manufacturing of Chips ........................................................................................ 3
2.2.1 Wafer Manufacturing: .............................................................................. 4
2.2.2 ASSEMBLY ............................................................................................. 6
Conclusion ...................................................................................................................... 8
REFERENCES ............................................................................................................... 9
 INTRODUCTION

1.1 Background:
An integrated circuit is a small but sophisticated device implementing several electronic
functions. The semiconductor chip is well recognized today for the fundamental
revolution it brought to the advancement of electronics technology. Since the first
integrated circuit was created by Jack Kilby in Texas Instruments labs more than 50
years ago, the idea of transistors on silicon becoming the building blocks for intelligent
processors has transformed almost every facet of daily life. Even though chips are
widely used, how the transformation of simple sand (silicon) into a highly complex chip
occurs is less widely known. It is made up of two major parts: a tiny and very fragile
silicon chip (die) and a package which is intended to protect the internal silicon chip
and to provide users with a practical way of handling the component.

1.2 Objective:

 To understand about the application of Photolithography.

 To understand about the use of Photolithography in manufacturing of chips.
 To relate advance manufacturing techniques with day to day life applications.

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 DISCUSSION

2.1 Semiconductor Chips:

An integrated circuit is a set of electronic circuits on one small flat piece of
semiconductor material, typically silicon. The joining of substantial quantities of tiny
transistors into a small chip results in circuits that are orders of magnitude smaller,
cheaper, and faster than those constructed of discrete electronic parts. The IC's large
scale manufacturing capacity, unwavering quality and building-block approach to
circuit configuration has ensured the rapid adoption of standardized ICs in place of
designs utilizing discrete transistors. ICs are presently utilized as a part of for all intents
and purposes all electronic gear and have revolutionized the world of hardware. PCs,
cell phones, and other advanced home machines are presently inseparable parts of the
structure of modern societies, made conceivable by the little size and ease of ICs.
Incorporated circuits were made practical by mid-twentieth century innovation
headways in semiconductor device creation. Since their beginnings in the 1960s, the
size, speed, and limit of chips have advanced colossally, determined by specialized
advances that fit an ever increasing number of transistors on chips of a similar size - a
cutting edge chip may have a few billion transistors in a territory the extent of a human
fingernail. These advances, generally following Moore's law, make computer chips of
today possess millions of times the capacity and thousands of times the speed of the
computer chips of the early 1970s.
ICs have two main advantages over discrete circuits: cost and performance. Cost is low
because the chips, with all their components, are printed as a unit
by photolithography rather than being constructed one transistor at a time. Furthermore,
packaged ICs use much less material than discrete circuits. Performance is high because
the IC's components switch quickly and consume comparatively little power because of
their small size and close proximity. The main disadvantage of ICs is the high cost to
design them and fabricate the required photomasks. This high initial cost means ICs are
only practical when high production volumes are anticipated.

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 Figure 1: Erasable Programmable Read-Only Memory (EPROM)

2.2 Manufacturing of Chips

Semiconductor device fabrication is the process used to create the integrated circuits. It
is a multiple-step sequence of photolithographic and chemical processing steps during
which electronic circuits are gradually created on a wafer made of
pure semiconducting material.

The entire manufacturing process, from start to packaged chips ready for shipment,
takes six to eight weeks and is performed in highly specialized facilities referred to
as fabs. In more advanced semiconductor devices, such as modern 14/10/7 nm nodes,
fabrication can take up to 15 weeks with 11–13 weeks being the industry average.

The manufacturing phase of an integrated circuit can be divided into two steps. The
first, wafer fabrication, is the extremely sophisticated and intricate process of
manufacturing the silicon chip. The second, assembly, is the highly precise and
automated process of packaging the die. Those two phases are commonly known as
“Front-End” and “Back-End”. They include two test steps: wafer probing and final test.

Figure 2: Manufacturing Flow Chart of an Integrated Circuit

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2.2.1 Wafer Manufacturing:
A normal wafer is made out of pure silicon that is grown into monocrystalline
cylindrical ingots up to 200 mm in diameter using Czochralski process; High purity
semiconductor grade silicon is melted in a furnace at 1425 °C, usually made of quartz
and Dopants are added as required. A precisely oriented rod-mounted seed crystal is
dipped into the molten silicon. The seed crystal's rod is slowly pulled upwards at around
1.5 mm/min and rotated simultaneously. The result is a single silicon crystal weighing
around 440 pounds. The crystal is so strong that it can be supported by 3mm cable but
it is brittle. By precisely controlling the temperature gradients, rate of pulling and speed
of rotation, it is possible to extract a large, single-crystal, cylindrical ingot from the melt.
Occurrence of unwanted instabilities in the melt can be avoided by investigating and
visualizing the temperature and velocity fields during the crystal growth process. Also
by checking it with chemicals and X-rays. This process is normally performed in
an inert atmosphere, such as argon, in an inert chamber, such as quartz. Then it is fed to
a silicon salami slicer (wire EDM may also be used). The produce wafer are just 2/3 of
a millimeter thick and 99.999 % pure.
Then the following processes are followed. Some of them are repeated several times at
different stages of the process. The order given here doesn't reflect the real order of
fabrication process.
This step shapes the different components. The principle is
PhotoMasking quite simple (see drawing on next page). Resin is put down
(Photolithography) on the wafer which is then exposed to light through a specific
mask. The lighten part of the resin softens and is rinsed off
with solvent.
Etching This operation removes a thin film material. There are two
different methods: wet (using a liquid or soluble compound)
or dry (using a gaseous compound like oxygen or chlorine)
Diffusion This step is used to introduce dopants inside the material or
to grow a thin oxide layer onto the wafer. Wafers are inserted
into a high temperature furnace (up to 1200 ° C) and doping
gazes penetrate the silicon or react with it to grow a silicon
oxide layer.
Ionic Implantation It allows to introduce a dopant at a given depth into the
material using a high energy electron beam.

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 Metal Deposition It allows the realization of electrical connections between the
different cells of the integrated circuit and the outside. Two
different methods are used to deposit the metal: evaporation
or sputtering.
Passivation Wafers are sealed with a passivation layer to prevent the
device from contamination or moisture attack. This layer is
usually made of silicon nitride or a silicon oxide composite.
Back-lap It’s the last step of wafer fabrication. Wafer thickness is
reduced (for microcontroller chips, thickness is reduced from
650 to 380 microns), and sometimes a thin gold layer is
deposited on the back of the wafer.

Figure 3: Photomasking Process

Photolithography, also termed optical lithography or UV lithography, is a process
used in microfabrication to pattern parts of a thin film or the bulk of a substrate. It uses
light to transfer a geometric pattern from a photomask to a light-sensitive chemical
"photoresist", or simply "resist," on the substrate. A series of chemical treatments then
either engraves the exposure pattern into, or enables deposition of a new material in the
desired pattern upon the material underneath the photo resist. For example, in
complex integrated circuits, a modern CMOS wafer will go through the
photolithographic cycle up to 50 times.
Wafer Probing. This step takes place between wafer fabrication and assembly. It
verifies the functionality of the device performing thousands of electrical tests, by
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means of special micro-probes (see graph on next page). Wafer probing is composed of
two different tests:
1. Process parametric test: this test is performed on some test samples and checks the
wafer fabrication process itself.
2. Full wafer probing test: this test verifies the functionality of the finished product
and is per-formed on all the dies.

The bad die are automatically marked with a black dot so they can be separated from
the good die after the wafer is cut. A record of what went wrong with the non-working
die is closely examined by failure analysis engineers to determine where the problem
occurred so that it may be corrected. The percentage of good die on an individual
wafer is called its yield.

2.2.2 ASSEMBLY

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The first step of assembly is to separate the silicon chips: this step is called die cutting.
Then, the die are placed on a lead frame: the “leads” are the chip legs (which will be
soldered or placed in a socket on a printed circuit board. On a surface smaller than a
baby's fingernail we now have thousands (or millions) of electronic components, all of
them interconnected and capable of implementing a subset of a complex electronic
function. At this stage the device is completely functional, but it would be impossible
to use it without some sort of supporting system. Any scratch would alter its behavior
(or impact its reliability), any shock would cause failure.
Therefore, the die must be put into a ceramic or plastic package to be protected from the
external world. A number of operations have to be made to realize this: they are
described on the following graph.

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 CONCLUSION

Photolithography is one of the most used technology in making semiconductor chips.

In a semiconductor chips, the circuit is created from photomasking the UV light and
creating the geometric pattern.
This technology helps us to produce more and more compact Chips resulting in more
efficient as well as more powerful processor. Further study and development in this field
will make future machine error less and maximum efficient.

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 REFERENCES

[ Microcontroller Division Applications, "INTRODUCTION TO

1 SEMICONDUCTOR TECHNOLOGY," STMicroelectronics, [Online]. Available:
] https://www.st.com/content/ccc/resource/technical/document/application_note/f1/3
6/51/95/ff/f3/44/19/CD00003986.pdf/files/CD00003986.pdf/jcr:content/translations
/en.CD00003986.pdf.
[ "Semiconductor Manufacturing: How a Chip is Made," [Online]. Available:
2 http://www.ti.com/corp/docs/manufacturing/howchipmade.shtml. [Accessed 12 07
] 2018].
[ "How do they make Silicon Wafers and Computer Chips?," [Online]. Available:
3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aWVywhzuHnQ. [Accessed 12 07 2018].
]
[ "Semiconductor device fabrication," Wikipedia, 22 06 2018. [Online]. Available:
4 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiconductor_device_fabrication#History.
] [Accessed 12 07 2018].
[ "Czochralski process," Wikipedia, 18 05 2018. [Online]. Available:
5 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czochralski_process. [Accessed 12 07 2018].
]
[ "How Semiconductors are Made," RENESAS, [Online]. Available:
6 https://www.intersil.com/en/support/glossary/manufacturing.html. [Accessed 13 07
] 2018].