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DCU's Nanomaterials Processing Lab in EU wafer damage project (SIDAM)

A DCU research team has recently been working on a major European Union collaboration to address a major manufacturing problem in the nanoelectronics industry.The project aims to reduce the problem of uncontrolled and expensive silicon wafer breakage in the integrated circuit manufacturing business. Microchips, or integrated circuits as they are also known, are produced on large thin "wafers" of silicon. Each wafer can measure up to a third of a metre across, but its actual thickness is less than a millimetre. During the manufacturing process unseen damage can occur in these wafers particularly due to high-temperature processing steps and by being bumped about by the special robots that carry them.

The EU collaboratoin is entitled "Investigation of Si wafer Damage in manufacturing processes" (SIDAM) and is funded by the European Commission. The SIDAM team has developed a revolutionary x-ray based monitoring technology which can see this damage without having to touch the wafers and, more importantly, can predict which wafers will break in the factory. This allows microchip manufacturers to avoid this problem by removing the wafers before they break, thus saving them many tens of millions of euro per annum in each factory. Prof. Patrick McNally, who leads the DCU team states: "our team in the Nanomaterials Processing Laboratory in DCU has been developing completely new techniques to allow companies such as Intel, IBM or Samsung look at three-dimensional images of this damage in a fashion very similar to CAT scans used in medical technology. The breakthrough technology has led to the development of a completely new analysis tool which is being manufactured by one of our partners in the project. This will allow companies, such as Intel based here in Ireland, to make major savings in the future"

For more details please see www.sidamproject.eu