GE's Quartz Business to Offer Custom Wafer Heater Assemblies for Semiconductor Equipment Manufacturers.
SAN FRANCISCO -- To help optimize the performance of heaters and electrostatic chucks in chip-making equipment, GE's Quartz business today announced an integrated heater assembly platform based at the company's new laboratory in Kobe, Japan. These custom assemblies - a critical subsystem of semiconductor equipment manufacturers' wafer chambers - combine customer-specific mechanical, electrical, and thermal engineering with GE's advanced chemical vapor deposited (CVD) ceramic heaters and e-chucks. By considering thermal, plasma, mechanical, and electrical boundary conditions of the OEM's chamber, GE's new integrated design process helps optimize the performance of the entire system.
According to Chris Intihar, GE product manager, Wafer Processing, "GE has designed a new heater assembly platform with the customer's needs in mind. GE's Quartz business is the only known supplier to provide forward integration that will help semiconductor equipment firms improve the performance of the entire wafer chamber, while helping to maximize their internal engineering resources. Our Kobe lab offers sophisticated design and testing capabilities and a dedicated technology team to help customers expedite their projects. To accelerate this iterative design process, we are leveraging our ceramics materials expertise from GE's Global Research Center in Niskayuna, N.Y., and our advanced predictive engineering and modeling capabilities from our team at GE's John F. Welch Technology Center in Bangalore, India. Our U.S. plant at our Strongsville, Ohio, world headquarters and our Japan plant near Himeji City, also play an integral part of the design and manufacturing process."
The GE technology team at Kobe will deliver complete heater assemblies featuring custom heaters, e-chucks, and its industry-standard quartz materials. GE heaters and e-chucks are mechanically and thermally more robust than sintered ceramic alternatives. They enable temperature ramp rates exceeding 10 C/second with maximum temperatures up to 1,300 C, and precise temperature control, generally within +/- 1 percent. These material performance advantages translate into increased throughput, greater process flexibility, and improved wafer yields for semiconductor equipment OEMs.
The Kobe facility, located in the Kobe International Business Center, is equipped with a Class 1000 (measured at 0.3 micron particulate level) or Class 100 (measured at 0.5 micron particulate level) clean room, thermal modeling capability, two test chambers capable of generating plasma and measuring electrostatic clamping force, multiple heater power supplies, and infrared cameras.
