Sales & orders
David Butler, director of Marketing at Trikon, comments: "The Leti sale is significant as this is one of the first 200mm BAW lines anywhere in the world. Their intention is to integrate BAW devices with logic circuits to reduce costs and form factor over current discrete approaches. Fabricating BAW devices above integrated circuitry will drive this market forward and open new applications for the technology."
BAW device yield is directly linked to thickness and material quality of the piezoelectric layer. Trikon reports that it has developed a number of key technology enablers in the arena of insulator deposition, surface treatments to enable correct filter quality on multiple electrode types, and most importantly thickness control within wafer and wafer to wafer. The Sigma fxP tool can be configured with patented hardware specifically developed for BAW deposition applications.
Freescale Semiconductor has ordered an HF vapour etch system from Semitool. The tool will be used to make micro electromechanical systems (MEMS) at TSC, Freescale's wafer fab in Sendai, Japan.
Chris Ostrem, Semitool's product manager for batch processing systems, comments: "Unlike competing single wafer tools, this system can process from one to 25 wafers at a time, thereby lowering per wafer production costs and improving productivity. The Semitool batch HF vapor etches system ordered by Freescale uses fewer chemicals than liquid based systems and takes up less clean room space than competing technologies."
As part of the MEMS manufacturing process, a layer of silicon dioxide is used to constrain micro-machined parts from movement during the fabrication process - oxide thicknesses can exceed 50microns. This oxide must be carefully removed to leave the structures free to move. Contamination-free etch and a complete dry are critical parameters in the successful vapour etch processing of MEMS devices.
