ON Semiconductor receives award from CERN
CERN is the world's largest particle physic laboratory. The ATLAS collaboration is one of the CERN's four major particle physics experiments. Utilising CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC), ATLAS will explore the fundamental nature of matter and the basic forces that shape the universe. Starting in mid-2008, the ATLAS detector will search for new discoveries in the head-on collisions of protons of extraordinarily high energy up to 7 trillion electron volts (TeV) per proton. ATLAS is one of the largest collaborative efforts ever attempted in the physical sciences, with 1,900 physicists from more than 166 universities and laboratories in 37 countries participating.
ON Semiconductor, in close co-operation with the Institute of Physics of Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, developed special technology using lithography on both sides of silicon wafers to deliver large area chips of Pixel Particle Sensors designed by ATLAS for use in the inner silicon tracker. To date, the company's efforts have been supported by a grant from the Czech Ministry of Trade and Industry.
"Customised double-sided technology for the Pixel Particle Sensors was developed and chips were produced at the ON Semiconductor production facility in Rožnov pod Radhoštìm in the Czech Republic, in close co-operation with the Institute of Physics of Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic," said Michael Mandracchia, vice president and general manager of ON Semiconductor, Czech Republic and Slovakia. "Hundreds and sometimes thousand of semiconductor chips are normally made simultaneously on each silicon wafer. In the case of the ATLAS Pixel Sensors, we made only three sensors on each wafer with active structures on both sides of the wafers. These wafers are half the thickness of standard production wafers. The process is extremely demanding because of the need for low defect density and careful wafer handling."
