Energy Saving Award Goes to Developers of New Semiconductor Manufacturing Equipment

The Dainippon Screen Manufacturing Co., an electronic equipment manufacturer, and Ushio Inc., an industrial equipment manufacturer, announced on February 5, 2008, that together they had won the President's Award in the "2007 Excellent Saving Energy Equipment" category, presented by the Japan Machinery Federation (JMF). They won the award for their jointly-developed "Flash Lamp Annealing System (LA-3000-F)," a new type of thermal treatment equipment for semiconductor manufacturing.

In the process of manufacturing integrated circuits, a temperature of over 1,000 degrees Celsius is required for activation after ion implantation. Conventionally, tungsten halogen lamp-based "spike annealing" is used for this treatment, but with an increasing level of integration, transistors become smaller and performance declines.

To overcome this challenge, the companies successfully developed the world's first xenon flash lamp-based annealing system, the LA-3000-F model, and already, as of the end of 2007, several dozens of them were being used in semiconductor manufacturing plants worldwide.

While the halogen lamp-based method heats up the whole semiconductor wafer, the new flash lamp system raises the temperature of an area of only a few micrometers on the wafer surface up to the necessary temperature in just a few thousandths of a second. Therefore, the average amount of electricity consumed by the new system can be reduced to less than one-third of that used conventionally. In addition, annual carbon dioxide emissions are about 297 tons, a reduction of approximately 70 percent compared to the conventional system, which emits about 1,079 tons a year when operated around the clock for 15 years.

http://www.screen.co.jp/index.html
http://www.ushio.co.jp/en/

Posted: 2008/05/15 11:20:19 PM