Rudolph achieves customer success with Firefly inspection system
Rudolph Technologies has announced that its Firefly inspection systems, shipped to fulfil previously announced orders from multiple semiconductor manufacturers, are now qualified for production.
The Firefly Inspection Systems provide high-resolution visual and non-visual inspection in a variety of advanced packaging processes, including fan-out wafer-level packaging, panel-level packaging and wafer-level chip-scale packaging. Rudolph expects over $5M in revenue in Q3 2017 from the accepted systems. Additional Firefly System shipments expected in Q4 2017.
"This latest inspection technology enables us to go beyond the limits of traditional area-scan technology to offer our customers an extendable platform for sub-micron resolution at a high throughput across a broadening range of applications," said Mike Plisinski, chief executive officer, Rudolph Technologies. "As expected, our Firefly systems are identifying defects that were previously undetectable. We will continue to collaborate closely with our customers to further enhance the platform and address our customers' challenges."
"The Firefly system features our patented Clearfind Technology to expose non-visual defects that traditional illumination cannot detect," said Mike Goodrich, vice president and general manager of Rudolph's Process Control Group. "Our customers regularly find defects that had been missed by conventional techniques, including missing or shorted redistribution layer (RDL) lines, un-etched organic film on under bump metallization (UBM) pads, and residual photoresist (PR) and polyimide (PI)."
Process control for advanced packaging is becoming increasingly more difficult as features, such as RDL, shrink to single-micron sizes, making them extremely hard to inspect due to nuisance defects caused by metal grains. Goodrich explained, "Clearfind Technology detects previously invisible defects, and when paired with Rudolph's Discover analytics software, provides comprehensive solutions for difficult process challenges. For example, on one customer's product, the Firefly system detected thin RDL lines that were below specification and had been missed by traditional bright field illumination. When the customer used Discover's advanced analysis of defects added at each layer, the wafer map enabled them to identify and eliminate the root cause of the problem."
