 | |
| Type | Business Unit of Applied Materials (Nasdaq: AMAT) |
|---|---|
| Industry | Semiconductor |
| Founded | Kalispell, Montana (1979) |
| Headquarters | Kalispell, Montana |
Number of employees | 1157 (2007) |
| Website | www.semitool.com |
Semitool was a semiconductor manufacturing/capital equipment company based in Kalispell, Montana.
The company designed, developed, manufactured high performance and precision chemical processing equipment. Products included electrochemical deposition systems for electroplating copper, gold, solder and other metals; surface preparation systems for cleaning, stripping and etching silicon wafers; and wafer transport container cleaning systems.
Their main competitors were the Austrian company SEZ, Solid State Equipment Corp. (SSEC), and American FSI International. [1] [2]
In 2009, Semitool was acquired by Applied Materials. [3] It operates Semitool as a business unit and still operates the facility in Kalispell. [4]
Semiconductor device fabrication is the process used to manufacture semiconductor devices, typically integrated circuit (IC) "chips" such as computer processors, microcontrollers, and memory chips such as NAND flash and DRAM that are present in everyday electrical and electronic devices. It is a multiple-step sequence of photolithographic and physico-chemical processing steps during which electronic circuits are gradually created on a wafer typically made of pure single-crystal semiconducting material. Silicon is almost always used, but various compound semiconductors are used for specialized applications.
In electronics, a wafer is a thin slice of semiconductor, such as a crystalline silicon (c-Si), used for the fabrication of integrated circuits and, in photovoltaics, to manufacture solar cells. The wafer serves as the substrate for microelectronic devices built in and upon the wafer. It undergoes many microfabrication processes, such as doping, ion implantation, etching, thin-film deposition of various materials, and photolithographic patterning. Finally, the individual microcircuits are separated by wafer dicing and packaged as an integrated circuit.
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Wafer fabrication is a procedure composed of many repeated sequential processes to produce complete electrical or photonic circuits on semiconductor wafers in semiconductor device fabrication process. Examples include production of radio frequency (RF) amplifiers, LEDs, optical computer components, and microprocessors for computers. Wafer fabrication is used to build components with the necessary electrical structures.
Wafer-scale integration (WSI) is a rarely used system of building very-large integrated circuit networks from an entire silicon wafer to produce a single "super-chip". Combining large size and reduced packaging, WSI was expected to lead to dramatically reduced costs for some systems, notably massively parallel supercomputers. The name is taken from the term very-large-scale integration, the state of the art when WSI was being developed.
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In the microelectronics industry, a semiconductor fabrication plant is a factory where devices such as integrated circuits are manufactured.
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Dicing tape is a backing tape used during wafer dicing or some other microelectronic substrate separation, the cutting apart of pieces of semiconductor or other material following wafer or module microfabrication. The tape holds the pieces of the substrate, in case of a wafer called as die, together during the cutting process, mounting them to a thin metal frame. The dies/substrate pieces are removed from the dicing tape later on in the electronics manufacturing process.
FSI International, Inc. (FSI) is an American manufacturing company based in Chaska, Minnesota that supplies processing equipment used to manufacture microelectronics, including semiconductor devices.
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