NEWS RELEASE                                                                            June 2017

Semiconductor IIoT & Remote O&M Webinar July 19 will identify 15 Top Purchasers

The semiconductor industry is already benefiting from IIoT and Remote O&M due to many processes involved in chip manufacture. This webinar will focus on the potential relating to the ultrapure water, gases and liquid chemicals used in the processes, air pollution control, water reuse, and movement of granular materials. We invite you to send us relevant data and to join us on Wednesday, July 19th.

The webinar will also identify the projected purchases of IIoT products by the top 15 semiconductor companies. The webinar will briefly address a marketing program to reach these purchasers of more than 50 percent of the IIoT products.

Semiconductor manufacturing processes can be divided into broad categories including silicon wafer manufacturing, creating mask patterns, wafer processing, assembly, and testing including reliability testing. Wafer processing is the core semiconductor manufacturing process centering on lithography and involves repeated stages of washing, heat treatment (oxidation), impurity infusion, film forming, and other steps.

The post-processing phase begins after processing of the wafer and includes assembly and subsequent steps. During this phase the chip is embedded in the package (assembly) and subjected to reliability and other kinds of testing.

As these steps involve a variety of processes including monitoring of temperature during heat treatment in thermal diffusion furnaces and monitoring of burn-in and other reliability tests, they require many recorders and data acquisition instruments. These instruments are also widely used for monitoring of ion currents during ion implantation, monitoring of cleaning solution and water levels in the washing process, and monitoring of temperature, humidity, and static electricity in clean rooms.

In the case of semiconductor production, manufacturing involves very precise processes in order to create layers of transistors with specific operating characteristics. Chemical and photolithographic steps are used to harden an exact representation onto a silicon wafer. Wafers are then cut into individual chips and electrical contact points are added. • As semiconductor fabrication processes reach 22 and 14 nm, manufacturers are able to pack more chips on a single wafer. Cutting and dicing of the wafer requires precision measuring on the scale of a thousandth of a millimeter. Blades and lasers are used to accomplish this etching and they function in multiple axes of motion and must integrate feedback about positioning at high resolution. • Additionally, delivery of control data between sensors and controllers has to have a latency of less than 100 microseconds. Add to this complexity the reality that cameras and video are increasingly being integrated into manufacturing and they have high bandwidth requirements. Bandwidth limitations at any step in the system create problems and if maintenance and diagnosis is to be handled remotely, connectivity into the lowest layer of a machine must be secure and real-time.

Because of these semiconductor manufacturing challenges the available capital and the orientation toward IIoT, the semiconductor industry will be an IIoT leader.

This webinar will build on two previous webinars. On April 28 we conducted a cleanroom webinar which you can view at https://youtu.be/Xe_NYnLmmAA. Products of ABB,

Danaher - One, Dickson, Enviroco, Mahindra, Sensegrow, Terra, Thermofisher, TSI and Vaisala were reviewed.

The ultrapure water webinar can be viewed at https://youtu.be/gRucY_BN47E. This includes coverage of products by ABB, Danaher-Hach, Endress & Hauser, Envriogen, GE Water, Kurita and Mettler Toledo.

To register for the webinar or view previous IIoT webinars click on Weekly IIoT Webinars

For more information on IIoT & Remote O&M click on N031 Industrial IOT and Remote O&M