Semes, South Korea's largest semiconductor equipment company, announced on the 22nd that it has newly developed a semiconductor high-temperature phosphoric acid cleaning equipment for logic foundries (model name Blue Ice Prime).
Following the memory sector last year, Semes has developed high-temperature phosphoric acid cleaning equipment for foundry processes below 2 nanometers, securing world-class process capabilities compared to Japanese competitors.
This equipment ejects high-temperature phosphoric acid onto semiconductor wafers, etching and stripping the pattern surfaces, with etching uniformity and impurity removal being its core technologies. It is expected to contribute to yield improvement in cutting-edge processes, including 2 nanometers.
In particular, Semes explained that the chuck developed in-house has been installed in the equipment to heat the wafers to high temperatures, enhancing the temperature uniformity between the center and the edges of the wafers, while reducing process defects by over 90%, which had been pointed out as a limitation of existing batch-type wet cleaning methods.
It was noted that performance optimization of the heater and chuck components improved etching uniformity by more than 40% compared to existing equipment for memory and produced compact green fab equipment by reducing the volume of the recycling system by 25% to minimize chemical usage.
Kim Kyung-hyun, Vice President of Semes, said, "With this equipment development, we expect to significantly improve the key factors of dispersion and defect rate in foundry leading processes, contributing to the demand companies' PPACT (power, performance, size, expense, time)." He added, "In the future, we plan to provide high-performance, low-power, high-yield equipment necessary for the production of various products including mobile, automotive, and high-performance computing through the development of a diversified product lineup with convergence.
Meanwhile, Semes, which achieved the industry's first annual sales of 3 trillion won, developed the world's first supercritical cleaning equipment for semiconductors in 2014, which was designated as a national core technology, and the high-temperature phosphoric acid technology has also been registered as a national advanced technology and product by the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy.