The SPIE Prism Awards gala event, held on February 1 in San Francisco during the Photonics West trade conference, honoured 24 firms across eight categories.
Precitec Optronik, which won the Test and Measurement category with its Flying Spot Scanner (FSS) 310, was one of them.
Precitec Optronics Sales Director Jean-Francois Pichot states, “That our Flying Spot Scanner 310 has won at this year’s Prism Awards presentation is a significant honour for us. We are certain that this cutting-edge scanner will give customers a competitive edge in measuring, inline inspection, and quality control. It has been accurately described as “a silent revolution in semiconductor metrology.”
Innovation in photonics
The Flying Spot Scanner 310 satisfies the criteria for “industrial innovation in photonics” as recognised by the SPIE Prism Awards. For typical applications, it can assess the total thickness variation (TTV), bow, and warp of a full 12-inch wafer in a single scan and find any voids in as little as 10 seconds per wafer.
Unique features
The FSS 310 tackles the problem of ultra-precise measuring devices typically operating very slowly and being highly expensive by combining OCT with wide field-of-view scanning. Non-contact ROI inspection is made possible by this scanner’s flexible and quick-moving measuring point within a large field of view, all while maintaining accuracy. By allowing a throughput of over 300 wafers per hour (including handling time), the FSS 310 may also greatly increase productivity in semiconductor production. The secret to this speed is its built-in scanning technology, which enables the long linear axis pathways to be swapped out for brief rotating motions. This eliminates the requirement for a precise axis and considerably cuts down on measurement times.
A broad range of applications
The FSS 310 allows measurements from just one side of a wafer, which is another significant advantage. In addition to measuring items behind or on the back side of a wafer, it can penetrate all frequently used semiconductor materials (apart from metal). The wide variety of applications the FSS 310 is appropriate for further demonstrates this flexibility. The FSS 310’s fully changeable scan trajectories, which the user can programme, enable thickness and distance measurements of, for example, Si, doped Si, GaAs, and SiC wafers when used in conjunction with devices from the Precitec CHRocodile® 2 IT family. The FSS 310 can also measure the bow of individual dies on wafers prior to further processing, as well as the thickness of semiconductor component coatings (for example, partial foliation of wafers).
SPIE Prism Awards
The 2023 Prism Award candidates, according to SPIE CEO Kent Rochford, “represent the most cutting-edge technologies and developments in the optics and photonics industry.” The International Society for Optics and Photonics (SPIE), which hosts the annual gala celebration of the Prism Awards, once again brought together engineers, scientists, academics, and business leaders to develop light-based research and technology since 1955.
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