Semitool, SECAP Alliance Develops 300mm Wafer Process

Electronic News, April 23, 2001

KALISPELL, MONT.-BASED Semitool Inc. and the Semiconductor Equipment Consortium for Advanced Packaging (SECAP), of which it is a charter member, have successfully developed a solder-bumping process for 300mm wafers. The technological advancement was a multicompany effort. Semitool's (nasdaq: SMTL) computational-fluid-dynamics (CFD) reactor supplied the plating technology to create a dense array of uniform high-lead solder bumps down to 20 micron in diameter with greater than 4200 I/O on a 10mm-by-10mm die.

Karl Suss of Munich, Germany, enabled the high-density array by providing 300mm equipment for coat, exposure and develop. Unaxis of Zurich, Switzerland, created a full-face copper seed-layer by sputtering with no edge exclusion. Image Technology of Palo Alto, Calif., produced the mask for clear edge-bead and full-area exposure on 300mm wafers. Fraunhofer Institute for Reliability and Microintegration of Berlin consulted and coordinated the development efforts.