#Industry News
From a grain of sand to a smartphone
Factory Automation & Robotics SMT Assembly
The central technical element of our modern world is the microchip. From the coffee machine to communication satellites, there is practically nothing that would function without it. Thus, the manufacture of microelectronic components is a key technology par excellence. Motors from FAULHABER play a role in all important steps here – from the processing of the silicon crystal to the assembly of PCBs.
Wafers of sand
The raw material for chip manufacture could hardly be simpler: sand, quartz sand to be precise. The sand is first melted, and other constituent parts are separated from the main component, silicon. A so-called seed crystal from the same material initiates crystal growth in the liquid mass. Cylindrical rods with homogeneous structure are created. Discs about two millimetres thick are cut off from these: the raw wafers. After some smoothing and polishing, the blanks are coated with a photosensitive lacquer. The conductor paths, the thickness of which in modern chips is in the nanometre range, are created with a photolithographic process and subsequent etching of the material.
The complex structures, which connect millions of transistors on a chip to form an integrated circuit, are thereby created. Each unit is exposed up to thirty times with different photomasks. The many dozens of units on the wafer must be exactly aligned with those from the previously performed exposure. In this multi-stage process, the chip structures then appear on the round disc, which is similar in appearance to a wafer and the source of its name.
Robots move the wafers during all steps and guide them to the various process steps. The blanks are highly sensitive and must not bump into anything anywhere in spite of what are usually constrained spaces in the systems. In order for error-free structures to be created, their alignment must be extremely precise. The same holds for the optical components of the lasers in the photolithographic systems. Ensuring the precise movement of the components with reliable reproducibility in the robots and in the lasers are drives from FAULHABER, such as DC, stepper or piezo motors.
