IC Technology

 

Full Custom IC Technology

-All layers are optimized for a particular ES implementation
-It involves placement of transistors to minimize interconnection length ,sizing transistor to optimize signal transmission and routing wires among transistors.
-It has high NRE cost and long time to market .
-It provides excellent performance ,small size and power.

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Semi Custom IC Technology

- The lower layers are fully build leaving the upper layers.
- It has low NRE and less time to market.
- It needs to integrate with full custom IC for critical regions of design.

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PLD IC Technology

- All layers already exists with a programmable circuit.
- It involves creation or destruction of connection between wires that connect gates,
- It has very low NRE and instant time-to-market.
- EPGA is a complex pld that offers general connectivity among blacks of logic.

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Steps in IC Manufacturing

IC Manufacturing:

IC is a semiconductor wafer in which various active and passive components along with external connections are fabricated in extremely tiny silicon chips.The various steps for IC manufacturing are as follows:
1. Wafer Production
2. Photolithography
3. Doping
4.Metallization
5.Assembly and packaging

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Wafer Production

Wafer is a round slice of semiconductor material such as silicon. In IC , silicon wafer is used :
- Purified polycrystalline SI is created from sand.
- It is heated to produce molten liquid.
- A small piece of solid Si is dipped into molten liquid.
- Solid silicon is slowly pulled from the melt.
- The liquid cools to form single crystal.
- A thin round wafer is cut using wafer slicer.
- The wafer surface is smoothened by polishing.
- It is cleaned and dried using high purity low particle chemicals

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Photolithography

- Photolithography is the process of printing a pattern of mask into the silicon wafer. It is carried out using light sensitive photoresist and controlled exposure to light.
- Positive photolithography prints a pattern that is same as the pattern on the mask.
- Negative photolithography prints a pattern that is opposite of the pattern as that on the mask.

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Doping

- To alter the electrical character of silicon ,atom with one less electron and atom with one more electron are introduced in to the area.
- The impurity atoms in semiconductor materials are moved at high temperature .

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Metallization

- It is used to create contact with Si and to make interconnections on chip.
- A thin layer of aluminium is deposited over the wafer.

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Assembly and packaging

Each wafer consists of many chips. These chips are separated and packaged by scribing and cleaving. A diamond saw is used to cut wafer into chips. The tested and verified chip is mounted into a package. It is encapsulated for protection.

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Water condition before

-Surface includes film composition , bare surface and reflectivity.
-It affects
-photoresist to wafer adhesion
-alignment accuracy
-Linewidth resolution
-exposure settings
-bake time.

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Wafer condition after

-Resist coated wafer.
-patterned resist layer
-withstand etching
-withstand ion implanting

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Photolithography Steps in Detail:

1. Surface preparation
- It increases adhesion of photoresist material to the substrate
- Dehydration bake removes water from substrate by baking at temp of 200 degree Celsius to 400 degree Celsius for 30 to 60 minutes.
- The substrate is then cooled and coated.
- Adhesion promoters like hexamethyl disilizane are used to react chemically with surface and replace –OH with organic function group.

2.Photoresist coating
- A thin uniform coating of photoresist is accomplished by spin coating
- The photoresist in liquid form is poured into the wafer and then spun at a high speed to produce desired film
- thickness is affected by spin speed , time and volume of resist.

3. Soft Bake
- The film contain about 20-40% by weight solvent.
- It involves drying or removing of excess solvent.
- it helps to stabilize the resist film.
- it improves adhesion and uniformity.
- It is baked in oven at 95 deg Celsius for 35 minutes.

4.Alignment and exposure
- A photo mask with pattern on one side is aligned over the wafer.
- A uv light (12mw) is exposed to the surface.
- The exposure time affects critical dimension. With increase in expose time, F increase.

5. Develop
- Soluble areas of photoresist are dissolved by developer chemical .
- A visible patterns appear on wafer.

6.Hard bake
- It hardens the final resist image.
- Hard bake is done at temp of 110 deg Celsius for about 30 minutes.
- It improves adhesion.

7.Develop Inspection
- The resist patterned wafer is inspected for particles,defects,CD, linewidth resolution and overlay accuracy.

8. Etching
- It is the selective removal of upper layer of wafer.
- It is performed either by using wet chemicals or in a dry plasma environment.

9. Strip
- It is the process of removing photo resist.
- Wet acid strip or dry plasma strip.

10. Final inspection
- Complete removal of photoresist.
- Pattern on wafer to ne correct .
- Defects, particles,, step height and CD are checked.

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Show top down view of circuit: F = xz + y on an IC.

The diagram is shown below: