Critical Power Solutions for the Semiconductor Industry

Power quality events can affect a variety of industries, including the semiconductor industry.

Poor power quality, specifically voltage events like sags and swells, can have devastating effects on production, causing significant quality issues and downtime.

These quality issues and downtime are very costly and have high impact on businesses. This highlights the importance of future proofing equipment and investing in the best power protection solution.

ABB’s Critical Power division can help industries like Semiconductor by providing highly efficient and reliable voltage output technologies like AVC (active voltage conditioner) and UPS’s (uninterrupted power supply) which can offer a range of autonomy options. Our wide range of products will enable your business to ride through voltage events including voltage sags, swells, and brownouts.

It's business as usual with ABB's Critical Power solutions in place.

Key Applications

Chip manufacturing

Glass manufacturing

Solar fabrication

Composites

Silicon wafer

Production of silicon wafers require care. The monocrystalline silicon ingots are manufactured by a technique called the CZ (Czochralski) crystal growth process. This pull rate and temperature are controlled. Another process stage that could be impacted by voltage sags is the ‘wire-sawing’ process where damage to the diamond blade could happen.

Integrated circuit / wafer fabrication

There are many fabrication processes including photolithography, etching, deposition and others which could be very costly if met by poor power quality. For these processes highly reliable power protection equipment can help protect these automated process tools

Chip and wafer packaging

Before the integrated circuit (or IC) goes into our smartphones or tablets, we have chip and wafer packaging. Efficient power protection equipment designed to protect wafer thinning, cutting, chip assembly, molding, and testing, can help reduce costs associated with downtime, and protect those delicate processes.

Display glass

Ensuring a uniform and contaminate free large glass panel requires the process tool to run efficiently and smoothly without power quality fluctuations. Active power conditioners like ABB’s PCS100 AVC-40 can help both hot and cold glass process tools maintain their best performance.

LCD / OLED fabrication

Like with wafer fabrication processes, sensitive photolithography and other critical process tools need to be protected against voltage sags, swells, and brownouts.

Solar Panel fabrication

Solar panel fabrication – much like wafer and display fabrication still use processes like diffusion, etching, deposition that work efficiently with power protection equipment.

Silicon wafers

Fiberglass

Glass fibers are used to build integrated circuit substrates for high performance smartphone processors and other electronics. There is a variety of process equipment that is sensitive to short-time voltage fluctuations leading to production losses. These need power protection support.

Substrate IC manufacturing

Flip-chip provide high density connections in compact size for high-performance computing chips: these include - graphics processors and application processors. Advanced processes and assembly equipment in a clean room environment produce these substrates. Manufacturers cannot afford for quality to be compromised.