• Journal of the Optical Society of Korea
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• v.14 no.2
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• pp.163-169
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• 2010

Novel wafer-level fabrication of a glass ball-lens is realized for optoelectronic applications. A Pyrex wafer is bonded to a silicon wafer and cross-cut into a square-tile pattern, followed by wet-etching of the underlying silicon. Cubes of Pyrex on the undercut silicon are then turned into ball shapes by thermal reflow, and separated from the wafer by further etching of the silicon support. Radial variation and surface roughness are measured to be less than ${\pm}3\;{\mu}m$ and ${\pm}1\;nm$, respectively, for ball diameter of about $500\;{\mu}m$. A surface defect on the ball that is due to the silicon support is shown to be healed by using a silicon-optical-bench. Optical power-relay of the ball lens showed the maximum efficiency of 65% between two single-mode fibers on the silicon-optical-bench.

• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.4 no.4
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• pp.506-516
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• 1998

In this paper, an algorithm is proposed to detect the malfunction of plasma-etching characteristics using EPD signal trajectories. EPD signal trajectories offer many information on plasma-etching process state, so they must be considered as the most important data sets to predict the wafer states in plasma-etching process. A recent work has shown that EPD signal trajectories were successfully incorporated into process modeling through critical parameter extraction, but this method consumes much effort and time. So Principal component analysis(PCA) can be applied. PCA is the linear transformation algorithm which converts correlated high-dimensional data sets to uncorrelated low-dimensional data sets. Based on this reason neural network model can improve its performance and convergence speed when it uses the features which are extracted from raw EPD signals by PCA. Wafer-state variables, Critical Dimension(CD) and uniformity can be estimated by simulation using neural network model into which EPD signals are incorporated. After CD and uniformity values are predicted, proposed algorithm determines whether malfunction values are produced or not. If malfunction values arise, the etching process is stopped immediately. As a result, through simulation, we can keep the abnormal state of etching process from propagating into the next run. All the procedures of this algorithm can be performed on-line, i.e. wafer to wafer.

• 정보저장시스템학회:학술대회논문집
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• 2005.10a
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• pp.22-25
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• 2005

In this research, a wafar-level transfer method of cantilever array on a conventional CMOS circuit has been developed for high density probe-based data storage. The transferred cantilevers were silicon nitride ($Si_3N_4$) cantilevers integrated with poly silicon heaters and piezoelectric sensors, called thermo-piezoelectric $Si_3N_4$ cantilevers. In this process, we did not use a SOI wafer but a conventional p-type wafer for the fabrication of the thermo-piezoelectric $Si_3N_4$ cantilever arrays. Furthermore, we have developed a very simple transfer process, requiring only one step of cantilever transfer process for the integration of the CMOS wafer and cantilevers. Using this process, we have fabricated a single thermo-piezoelectric $Si_3N_4$ cantilever, and recorded 65nm data bits on a PMMA film and confirmed a charge signal at 5nm of cantilever deflection. And we have successfully applied this method to transfer 34 by 34 thermo-piezoelectric $Si_3N_4$ cantilever arrays on a CMOS wafer. We obtained reading signals from one of the cantilevers.

• Transactions of Materials Processing
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• v.13 no.3
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• pp.225-229
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• 2004

Chemical Mechanical Polishing(CMP) process becomes one of the most important semiconductor processes. But the basic mechanism of CMP still does not established. Slurry fluid dynamics that there is a slurry film between a wafer and a pad and contact mechanics that a wafer and a pad contact directly are the two main studies for CMP. This paper based on the latter one, especially on the abrasion wear model. Material Removal Rate(MRR) is calculated using the trajectory length of every point on a wafer during the process time. Both the rotational velocity of a wafer and a pad and the wafer oscillation velocity which has omitted in other studies are considered. For the purpose of the verification of our simulation, we used the experimental results of S.H.Li et al. The simulation results show that the tendency of the calculated MRR using the relative velocity is very similar to the experimental results and that the oscillation effect on MRR at a real CMP condition is lower than 1.5%, which is higher than the relative velocity effect of wafer, and that the velocity factor. not the velocity itself, should be taken into consideration in the CMP wear model.

• Proceedings of the Korean Vacuum Society Conference
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• 2012.02a
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• pp.433-433
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• 2012

As the requirement in patterning geometry continuously shrinks down, the termination of etch process at the exact time became crucial for the success in nano patterning technology. By virtue of real-time optical emission spectroscopy (OES), etch end point detection (EPD) technique continuously develops; however, it also faced with difficulty in low open ratio etching, typically in self aligned contact (SAC) and one cylinder contact (OCS), because of very small amount of optical emission from by-product gas species in the bulk plasma glow discharge. In developing etching process, one may observe that coupon test is being performed. It consumes costs and time for preparing the patterned sample wafers every test in priority, so the coupon wafer test instead of the whole patterned wafer is beneficial for testing and developing etch process condition. We also can observe that etch open area is varied with the number of coupons on a dummy wafer. However, this can be a misleading in OES study. If the coupon wafer test are monitored using OES, we can conjecture the endpoint by experienced method, but considering by data, the materials for residual area by being etched open area are needed to consider. In this research, we compare and analysis the OES data for coupon wafer test results for monitoring about the conditions that the areas except the patterns on the coupon wafers for real-time process monitoring. In this research, we compared two cases, first one is etching the coupon wafers attached on the carrier wafer that is covered by the photoresist, and other case is etching the coupon wafers on the chuck. For comparing the emission intensity, we chose the four chemical species (SiF2, N2, CO, CN), and for comparing the etched profile, measured by scanning electron microscope (SEM). In addition, we adopted the Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) algorithm for analyzing the chose OES data patterns, and analysis the covariance and coefficient for statistical method. After the result, coupon wafers are over-etched for without carrier wafer groups, while with carrier wafer groups are under-etched. And the CN emission intensity has significant difference compare with OES raw data. Based on these results, it necessary to reasonable analysis of the OES data to adopt the pre-data processing and algorithms, and the result will influence the reliability for relation of coupon wafer test and whole wafer test.

• Journal of Korean Society of Industrial and Systems Engineering
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• v.39 no.1
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• pp.73-80
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• 2016

This study focuses on the formation of input release lots in a semiconductor wafer fabrication facility. After the order-lot pegging process assigns lots in the fab to orders and calculates the required quantity of wafers for each product type to meet customers' orders, the decisions on the formation of input release lots should be made to minimize the production costs of the release lots. Since the number of lots being processed in the wafer fab directly is related to the productivity of the wafer fab, the input lot formation is crucial process to reduce the production costs as well as to improve the efficiency of the wafer fab. Here, the input lot formation occurs before every shift begins in the semiconductor wafer fab. When input quantities (of wafers) for product types are given from results of the order-lot pegging process, lots to be released into the wafer fab should be formed satisfying the lot size requirements. Here, the production cost of a homogeneous lot of the same type of product is less than that of a heterogeneous lot that will be split into the number of lots according to their product types after passing the branch point during the wafer fabrication process. Also, more production cost occurs if a lot becomes more heterogeneous. We developed a multi-dimensional dynamic programming algorithm for the input lot formation problem and showed how to apply the algorithm to solve the problem optimally with an example problem instance. It is necessary to reduce the number of states at each stage in the DP algorithm for practical use. Also, we can apply the proposed DP algorithm together with lot release rules such as CONWIP and UNIFORM.

• Journal of Korea Foundry Society
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• v.33 no.2
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• pp.69-74
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• 2013

Silicon (Si) wafer was grown by using direct growth from Si melt and contaminations of wafer during the process were investigated. In our process, BN was coated inside of all graphite parts including crucible in system to prevent carbon contamination. In addition, coated BN layer enhance the wettability, which ensures the favorable shape of grown wafer by proper flow of Si melt in casting mold. As a result, polycrystalline silicon wafer with dimension of $156{\times}156$ mm and thickness of $300{\pm}20$ um was successively obtained. There were, however, severe contaminations such as BN and SiC on surface of the as-grown wafer. While BN powders were easily removed by brushing surface, SiC could not be eliminated. As a result of BN analysis, C source for SiC was from binder contained in BN slurry. Therefore, to eliminate those C sources, additional flushing process was carried out before Si was melted. By adding 3-times flushing processes, SiC was not detected on the surface of as-grown Si wafer. Polycrystalline Si wafer directly grown from Si melt in this study can be applied for the cost-effective Si solar cells.

• Proceedings of the Optical Society of Korea Conference
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• 2000.02a
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• pp.224-225
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• 2000

Transparent and hard materials such as sapphire are used for many industrial applications as optical windows, hard materials on mechanical contact against abrasion, and substrate materials for opto-electronic semiconductor devices such as blue LED and blue LD etc. The materials should be cut along the proper shapes possible to be used for each application. In case of blue LED, the blue LED wafer should be cut to thousands of blue LED pieces at the final stage of the manufacturing process. The process of cutting the wafer is usually divided into two steps. The wafer is scribed along the proper shapes in the first step. It is inserted between transparent flexible sheets for easy handling. And then, it is broken and split in the next step. Harder materials such as diamonds are usually used to scribe the wafer, while it has a problem of low depth of scribing and abrasion of the harder material itself. The low depth of scribing can induce failure in breaking the wafer along the scribed line. It was also known that the expensive diamond tip should be replaced frequently for the abrasion. (omitted)

• Journal of the Korean Society for Precision Engineering
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• v.17 no.5
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• pp.70-75
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• 2000

After the patterning and probe process of wafer have been achieved, the dicing process is necessary to separate chips from a wafer. The dicing process cuts a wafer to lengthwise and crosswise direction to make many chips by using narrow circular rotating diamond blade. But inferior goods are made under the influence of complex dicing environment such as blade, wafer, cutting water and cutting conditions. This paper describes a monitoring algorithm using feature extraction in order to find out an instant of vibration signal change when bad dicing appears. The algorithm is composed of two steps: feature extraction and decision. In the feature extraction, two features processed from vibration signal which is acquired by accelerometer attached on blade head are proposed. In the decision. a threshold method is adopted to classify the dicing process into normal and abnormal dicing. Experiment have been performed for GaAs semiconductor wafer. Based upon observation of the experimental results, the proposed scheme shown a good accuracy of classification performance by which the inferior goods decreased from 35.2% to 12.8%.

• Transactions of the Korean Society of Mechanical Engineers A
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• v.29 no.1 s.232
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• pp.96-106
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• 2005

An integrated single-wafer processing tool, composed of multiple single wafer processing modules, transfer robots, and load locks, has complex routing sequences, and often has critical post-processing residency constraints. Scheduling of these tools is an intricate problem, and testing schedulers with actual tools requires too much time and cost. The Single Wafer Processor (SWP) simulator presented in this paper is to validate an on-line scheduler, and evaluate performance of integrated single-wafer processing tools before the scheduler is actually deployed into real systems. The data transfer between the scheduler and the simulator is carried out with TCP/IP communication using messages and files. The developed simulator consists of six modules, i.e., GUI (Graphic User Interface), emulators, execution system, module managers, analyzer, and 3D animator. The overall framework is built using Microsoft Visual C++, and the animator is embodied using OpenGL API (Application Programming Interface).