Semiconductor Manufacturing Process
Before producing an integrated circuit, a semiconductor wafer goes through a wide range of processes steps. The key steps are Physical Vapor Deposition (PVD) and Chemical Vapor Deposition (CVD), photolithography, Rapid Thermal Processing (RTP), Plasma Etch, and Chemical-Mechanical Planarization (CMP). For many years the standard practice to perform these steps was to do so in batches on many wafers at a time so that a large number of identical chips can be produced at the same time. When the demand for smaller critical dimensions (CD) of the devices on the chip is increased and to make the production process flexible, the makers went for integrated circuits. Wafer fabrication comes under Wafer front end . OVERVIEW OF TYPICAL WAFER PROCESSING EQUIPMENT The wafer processing equipment is not produced in a single step, there are many process steps which are necessary to produce a ULSI the circuit on a wafer. The physical processes are organized into groups that correspond to the