VLSI CHIP MAKING’S SINGULAR FUTURE

          VLSI CHIP MAKING’S SINGULAR FUTURE

                                                               

                                   

 ABSTRACT

                Since the invention of the integrated circuit in 1958, the number of processing steps required to make one has grown from less than 10 to several hundreds. At the same time, the silicon wafers on which the VLSI ICs are produced have gone from being coin sized to being dinner-plate –sized. Today one of these 300-mm wafers can yield more than 700 Ics.With such a large number of Ics coming from a single wafer and with wafers coming off manufacturing lines at rates of tens of thousands a month, companies can quickly find themselves suffering from losses especially in turbulent markets. Batch process which is being followed nowadays by VLSI chip makers is one of the main reasons for these losses. In batch process machines work on a large batch of wafers at the same time and take more than three months to produce VLSI Ics. To avoid the overproduction of chips, one method is to go for single wafer process. In single wafer process semiconductor companies will be able to produce chips more quickly when the orders came in, in the exact quantities specified by those orders. In this paper the IC fabrication steps are given in brief. Batch process and the Single wafer process are compared in detail. In the following years all manufacturers will inevitably adopt single wafer manufacturing process in order to have faster, cheaper, smaller and good quality chips.