God-level industrial master

Chapter 275 Zero Breakthrough
The raw material for wafer manufacturing is silicon, and going back a little further, the raw material is silicon dioxide.

In layman's terms, wafers are made of sand.

Of course, silicon ore can also be used, and the silicon content of this raw material is higher.Whether it is sand or silicon ore, they are the raw materials for manufacturing wafers.

The first step in manufacturing wafers is deoxidation purification.

The sand/quartz is purified to obtain silica with a silicon content of 25%.Silica is refined by an electric arc furnace, chlorinated with hydrochloric acid, and distilled to obtain crystalline silicon with a purity of more than 99%.The purity requirements of crystalline silicon are very high, which is why it is expensive to make wafers.

Workers are loading the electric arc melting furnace.This raw material is naturally not sand, but relatively high-purity silica.

Tang Fei is an expert, knowing that the first step in wafer production is deoxidation and purification, so he walked directly to the electric arc melting furnace, and happened to see the workers loading materials.

When Wang Xingkui and the others saw Tang Fei, they greeted him one after another and said hello to Tang Fei.

Tang Fei glanced at the current situation, and asked with great interest: "Xingkui, how is the preparation going, when will the furnace be turned on for purification?"

This is what Tang Fei is more concerned about.

As soon as the production is started and the production of the first process is started, the subsequent processes will keep up and the first batch of wafers will be produced.

At present, wafers are in short supply in the international market.

No, in Tang Fei's memory, it seems that this thing has always been in short supply.What Tang Fei remembers most is that in 2016, the shortage of global wafers caused the prices of memory sticks and solid-state drives to soar.Wafers were out of stock in the international market for a while.

Simply put, a wafer refers to a silicon wafer with an integrated circuit. Because its shape is round, it is called a wafer.

Wafers are widely used in the field of electronic digital.Memory sticks, SSDs, CPUs, graphics cards, mobile phone memory, mobile phone fingerprint chips, etc. It can be said that wafers are indispensable for almost all electronic digital products.

In the future, the global shortage of wafers will often appear, which not only leads to the price increase of memory sticks and SSDs, but also causes the entire field of electronic digital products to be severely affected.The importance of the wafer can be seen.

Tang Fei intends to manufacture his first batch of wafers as soon as possible and bring them to the market.

Seeing the boss asking about the production preparations, Wang Xingkui said: "All preparations are basically ready, the preparation of process materials and personnel training have been completed, the workers can carry out production according to the process we have formulated, and the first batch of raw materials has also begun to be loaded into the furnace, and smelting will begin immediately. The first step is deoxygenation purification."

Tang Fei was in high spirits. He was beside him happily, watching everyone busy.Under the guidance of the technicians, the first batch of raw materials was loaded into the furnace, and after the inspection was correct, Wang Xingkui came to ask for instructions.

"Boss, should we start the furnace again tomorrow morning for deoxidation and purification, or should we start now?"

Since the furnace can be turned on for purification, what are you waiting for? Tang Fei waved his hand and said, "From now on, I want to take a look at the quality of our first furnace of silicon."

Following Tang Fei's decision, the workers began to work, and the electric arc melting furnace started to deoxidize and purify the first furnace of silicon dioxide.

This is a process and it takes time.

After Tang Fei took a look, he didn't wait there all the time, as long as there were technicians and technical experts waiting beside him for guidance.

"Come on, let's take a look at other wafer production equipment."

Accompanied by Yang Chenglin and Wang Xingkui, Tang Fei looked at the wafer production equipment.Worthy of being a technical expert, Wang Xingkui and the others have a very scientific and reasonable layout of production equipment.

All production equipment has been debugged and has reached the production state. Next to some production equipment, technicians and production workers can be seen.

the next day.

Tang Fei went to the production site again, and started the deoxidation and purification of silicon dioxide yesterday afternoon. The first batch of metallurgical-grade silicon should have been produced.

That's right, metallurgical grade silicon.

The first step in wafer manufacturing is silicon purification.Put the silicon dioxide raw material into an electric arc furnace with a temperature of about 2000 ℃ and a carbon source. At high temperature, the carbon and the silicon dioxide in the sand undergo a chemical reaction (carbon and oxygen combine to leave silicon) , to obtain pure silicon with a purity of about 98%, also known as metallurgical grade silicon.

This is not pure enough for microelectronics, since the electrical properties of the semiconductor material are very sensitive to the concentration of impurities, so further purification is performed on metallurgical-grade silicon.

Generally speaking, the purity of metallurgical grade silicon is about 98%, and manufacturers with good quality can generally control the purity above 98%.

When Tang Fei walked into the production plant, he had already seen Wang Xingkui and others, and also saw the workers preparing for the second step of the process, preparing to further purify the metallurgical-grade silicon to reach the level of electronic-grade silicon.

"Boss, the first batch of metallurgical-grade silicon has been produced, take a look, here is the inspection report!"

Tang Fei took the inspection report and said happily after seeing it: "Good guy, it's an instant hit. The purity of the metallurgical silicon we produce has reached over 99%, which is amazing."

Wang Xingkui said modestly: "The main reason is that our production equipment is good, and the production process is not bad."

Tang Fei knew that in addition to these reasons, there was another important factor, that is, his own quality +2 UBFF was quietly playing a role.

The quality of metallurgical-grade silicon is so good, so what kind of quality can be achieved in the final manufactured product, that is, the wafer.

This is very much to look forward to!

Metallurgical-grade silicon is produced with near perfection, and the next step is to produce electronic-grade silicon.

The pulverized metallurgical-grade silicon is chlorinated with gaseous hydrogen chloride to generate liquid silane, and then through distillation and chemical reduction processes, high-purity polysilicon, that is, electronic-grade silicon, is obtained.

Under the guidance of technicians, workers are already starting to manufacture electronic-grade silicon.

The first batch of electronic grade silicon has also been successfully produced, its purity is as high as 99.999999999%.Then follow a series of processes until qualified wafers are produced.

These days, Tang Fei has basically stayed at Jiuzhou Electronics, and even Wanheng Real Estate Group has no time to go.

The production process of the wafer is relatively smooth. Deoxidation and purification produce metallurgical-grade silicon, and then electronic-grade silicon is produced, and the subsequent processes are in progress.The manufacture of silicon wafers can be summarized into three basic steps: silicon extraction and purification, single crystal silicon growth, and wafer molding.

Tang Fei hardly left Jiuzhou Electronics until the first batch of wafers were produced.

The finished wafers are thin discs, eight inches in diameter, or eight-inch wafers.They look very beautiful, smooth as a mirror.

Yang Chenglin shouted happily: "Boss, the first batch of wafers has been manufactured!"

Wang Xingkui next to him also said excitedly: "This is the basic raw material of chips and integrated circuits - silicon wafers, this is 'wafer'."

The first wafers were successfully produced.

Tang Fei was very happy, and said loudly: "This should be the first batch of eight-inch wafers produced in our country. This is a zero breakthrough."

This is definitely a zero breakthrough, filling the gap in the country!

Just don't know how the quality is?
After the wafer is manufactured, there is a strict inspection process behind it. Only when the inspection is qualified and the number of bad pixels is within the qualified range, can they be considered as truly qualified products.

Tang Fei was well aware of this, and waved his hand: "Arrange inspections to see how the quality of our first batch of wafers is."

Everyone is looking forward to the quality of this batch of wafers. This is the case for Yang Chenglin, Wang Xingkui, and the technicians and production workers who participated in the trial production of the wafers.

Jiuzhou Electronics has a complete set of advanced testing equipment and advanced testing methods, and immediately conducts quality testing on these batches of wafers to see if they can meet the quality requirements.

Several technicians, some quality personnel, are all busy, conducting quality inspection on this batch of wafers that have just been manufactured.

Even Dong Bo, Ma Weijun and Hao Hongxia, three technical experts, participated in the process and strictly inspected these wafers.

Wafer testing is the most typical wafer needle testing process. Jiuzhou Industry adopts such a testing process and has related needle testing equipment.

Mainly detect defects on the wafer, such as dead pixels, damage, cracks, pores, etc.

Wafer testing is to test each die on the wafer. A hair-thin probe made of gold wire is installed on the detection head to contact the contacts on the die to test its electrical characteristics. The pellets will be marked.

Several needle testers, meticulous, strictly followed the inspection process to inspect the wafer, and the time passed by 1 minute and 1 minute.

One of the inspectors was sweating on his forehead, and quickly wiped it gently, looked at the needle testing equipment, and then at the inspected wafer, with a slightly abnormal expression.

Dong Bo is an expert. He found out that the inspector was abnormal, and asked with concern: "Xiao Zhang, what's wrong?"

Xiao Zhang said slowly: "Expert Dong, there seems to be something wrong. Is there something wrong with our testing equipment? Come and have a look."

what!
Dong Bo was slightly startled, this is brand new, advanced testing equipment, and it is a product of the system, so how could there be any malfunction? Could it be that Xiao Zhang made a mistake in operation.

Dong Bo himself started the inspection of the wafer, and several technicians and quality personnel surrounded him one after another, watching expert Dong personally inspect the wafer.

"what!"

Dong Bo let out a soft "Huh", looking very surprised.

It was this surprise that made the hearts of many people beside him beat faster and tense up invisible.Some people were even so nervous that it seemed that their heart was about to jump out of their throats.

Someone even blurted out, "Expert Dong, what's wrong, what's the problem!"

.........

The third update will continue today, and the second update will be delivered!

(End of this chapter)