Speedfam-ipec Corporation

Craig M Howard

Chris E Karlsrud

Robert F Allen

Periya Gopalan

Jose R Gonzalez-Martin

Jon R MacErnie

Arthur Hamer

Toby Jordan

Jeff Cunnane

Bill Thornton

Fernando Calderon

Gene Hempel

Mike L Bowman

Tim Dyer

Yushin Son

An integral machine for polishing, cleaning, rinsing and drying workpieces such as semiconductor wafers. A load/unload station has a plurality of platforms for receiving cassettes of wafers to be processed. A dry end-effector of a robot retrieves wafers from the cassettes and transfers them to an index table. A transfer apparatus having wafer carrier elements picks up wafers from the index table, moves the wafers to a polishing table for polishing, and returns the wafers to the index table for further processing. A flipper moves the polished wafers to a cleaning station. The cleaning station includes scrub stations, a rinsing station and a spin dryer station, and a connective system of water tracks. A wet end-effector of the robot transfers rinsed wafers to the spin dryer station. The dry end-effector of the robot moves dried wafers from the spin dryer station back to the cassette of origination.

Mapping system for semiconductor wafer cassettes

Combined CMP and wafer cleaning apparatus and associated methods

A method for planarizing the surface of a wafer against a polishing pad includes the steps of securing the wafer in a carrier, pressing the wafer against the polishing pad, rotating both the wafer and pad, and moving the wafer across the polishing pad to create one or more geometric patterns relative to the pad. Geometric patterns employed by the present method include a 'figure eight', an elliptical pattern, and a peanut-shaped pattern. In one embodiment of the invention, both a 'figure eight' pattern and an elliptical pattern are used during a single planarizing operation. Bezier splines (curves) are used to create geometric patterns employed by the planarizing process. The use of Bezier splines requires that only two endpoints and two control points be stored in a memory device to represent the entire curve between the two endpoints, thus reducing the amount of data that has to be stored and transferred in order to operate a programmable wafer carrier in accordance with the present method.

Method for chemical mechanical polishing using synergistic geometric patterns

Integral machine for polishing, cleaning, rinsing and drying workpieces

Growing community of inventors

Gilbert, AZ, United States of America

Craig M Howard