0:00:03 Hi, my name is Daniel Higgs and I'm with forge nano. Thank you so much for having me to give this 0:00:09 presentation today at the SBC Tech on 2021 and thank you also to the Spc Foundation who gave me 0:00:16 student scholarship several years back to attend in providence Rhode island. So I'm here today to 0:00:23 talk to you about L. D. Cap, which is R L. D. Encapsulation of wafers, devices and objects. So let's 0:00:31 get started. 0:00:36 So today I'm going to talk about L. D. Cap technology, a bit of general background information, Then 0:00:42 quickly talk through two case studies and then the equipment that we offer that provides this L. D. 0:00:48 Cap technology. So first of all, what is L. D. Cap? Well L. D. Cap is our proprietary encapsulation 0:00:56 technology that uses atomic layer deposition, atomic layer deposition or A L. D. Is a layer by layer, 0:01:03 gas phase sequential self limiting coding technique, very similar to CVD but better 0:01:13 in terms of the chemistries that can be deposited with the gold. There are a bunch of different ones. 0:01:18 Feel free to go to atomic limits dot com and check out their L. D. Tool to see if the chemistry 0:01:25 you're interested in is listed there. We do a lot of these, we do a lot of metal oxides, medals, 0:01:31 night rides and we also do some phosphates and some organic materials as well. 0:01:38 So L. D. Cap is our encapsulation technology that uses atomic layer deposition um to encapsulate 0:01:45 wafers devices and objects that need to be exposed to harsh environments. So the uses for that are 0:01:52 encapsulation of semiconductor wafers for applications such as R. F. Power or antenna or display 0:01:58 applications such as micro oh LED or micro LED wafers. And this is for markets that include military, 0:02:06 automotive and aerospace. Mostly also RLD cap provides encapsulation of display panels and objects 0:02:14 for medical devices. PCBs for consumer electronics, automotive display and other items that require 0:02:22 protection from moisture and oxygen. 0:02:26 So here on the right we have an image of our el cap coding. It's a multi layer coating and this 0:02:33 Scale bar down here is 500 nm. So the total thickness for this Specific images, about 200 nm. And 0:02:40 this coding is really quite impressive. It's a flexible ceramic coating. It can be deposited down to 0:02:46 80 C. So it's it's applicable for um back end wafer processes for example encapsulation of dice 0:02:56 wafers or other things like that where there may be organic containing components lying around the L. 0:03:04 D. Cap provides an ultra low water vapor permeability. Um and 38 C. That's measured at less than 10 0:03:12 of the -10 which is ridiculously good. Our coding passes the mil STD 88 3 E environmental endurance 0:03:21 testing at the 290 me respect. It's a versatile coding. It's not invasive and it can be used in 0:03:30 addition to or in replacement of other encapsulation technologies to provide for better performance. 0:03:36 The cap can be used at the wafer level to replace silicon nitride cap preservation or the dye or 0:03:42 package levels. And it can also be tailored with specific keynesian properties too result in 0:03:50 extremely good adhesion to different materials. And in fact we've been able to get the lesions that 0:03:54 are similar to that of galvanised zinc on steel which is ridiculously yet. So case study one um is L. 0:04:03 D. Cap for our devices with Raytheon Technologies. So the problem was that the silicon nitride PCV 0:04:10 they were using was both too expensive um and not high enough performing. Um It was About .8 microns 0:04:18 and it just was not achieving the mil spec required. So the goal was to use atomic letter position 0:04:24 specifically R. L. D. Cap technology in the mimic wafer fabrication process to enable lower cost 0:04:32 hermetic packaging of their devices. So the intended outcome was that we performed work under title 0:04:40 3 to optimize and qualify the L. D. Cap for two of the Galley Marks Night Processes for production 0:04:47 at Raytheon's facility in and over. So let's take a look at what happened. So we tested the standard 0:04:56 existing technology against R. O. D. Cap technology both under The same conditions which were 96 0:05:02 hours with a hast or an extremely harsh accelerated testing. Um of 130 C and 85 relative humidity. 0:05:11 For those of you that are familiar with accelerated testing, it's quite common to do in 85 85. Um 0:05:18 And in terms of how we relate to that we would be about 1000 hours of 85 85 is equivalent to 130 85. 0:05:29 So in terms of what happened, well the existing tech completely felt this this very harsh test. Um 0:05:35 in fact 99 of the feds failed when we did the old cap Technology ranging from 10 nm to 200 nm. We 0:05:45 mostly passed. I mean we had a 97 pass rate or higher than 97 pass or in other words Look at that is 0:05:52 to say less than three failure. In addition to that, the L. D. Cap had benefits such as lower 0:05:58 dielectric loading, better fat performance. We were able to get a two x tighter tolerance on the 0:06:04 capacitors because the l decoding was so can formulate thin and there was less variation in the 0:06:09 actual R. F. Properties of the fats, which is also a great benefit of the L decoding here in the 0:06:17 table, you can see a few of the failure rates for the optical feds Andy bean fete with the silicon 0:06:23 nitride standard existing tech compared with the L. D. Cap. 0:06:30 So the second case study is a handicap as a parallelize Caroline replacement. So let's take a look 0:06:36 at this. So the problem here is that many medical devices um and PCBs and other objects need to 0:06:45 withstand quite harsh conditions in terms of uh saline conditions or high moisture conditions or 0:06:51 high temperature conditions. And Caroline is a standard coding that is often used to protect such 0:06:57 devices. But in many cases it just isn't quite good enough. It doesn't quite provide the performance 0:07:02 that is required for certain applications. So the goal of this project was to use A L. D. In place 0:07:08 of Caroline to protect devices from moisture and oxygen. And this has applications in the military, 0:07:14 automotive and other markets such as medical. So the intended outcome here was to beat the 0:07:20 specifications of Caroline and produce a much more robust encapsulation technology for the air 0:07:26 stringent requirements of various devices. So when we compare the various properties of hailed cap 0:07:36 Caroline and your thing coding, you can start to see that the L. D. Cap technology really shines. 0:07:42 It's just amazing to be honest. Um The L. D. Cap compared with Caroline has a much lower W. V. Tr 0:07:49 and it's not just a little bit lower. We're talking many orders of magnitude lower. Um Here's the 0:07:54 number here, it's about 0.83 for Carolyn C. And it's less than 10 14% of minus 10 for L. D. Cap. 0:08:02 That's ridiculously good. Um Also the oxygen transmission rate or the oxygen permeability is much 0:08:08 lower for the L. D. Cap again by many orders of magnitude. Um The L. D. Cap can operate at a much 0:08:16 higher temperature because it's a metal oxide coding compared with Caroline's or organic coding. Um 0:08:21 You're not limited there and in fact the L. D. Cap coding can withstand temperatures above 1500 C 0:08:30 which makes it attractive certain high temperature applications as well. Additionally high heat 0:08:35 dissipation, lower thickness and higher dielectric constants are benefits available cap over 0:08:39 paranoid. 0:08:41 So in terms of the equipment for L. D. Cap We offer three main types of equipment. There is theatre 0:08:47 which is for R. And D. L. Single wafers, Apollo which is for production in a cassette to cassette, 0:08:54 automatic robotic production system and helios which is our system for production of the cap haunted 0:09:02 panels such as display panels or large objects or batch processing of multiple small object. 0:09:12 So efficiency is everything. Um here the main point is that most of the equipment manufacturers have 0:09:21 equipment that is inefficient. Um It uses more chemical than is technically necessary and it's 0:09:28 slower than than it could be. And this can lead to much thicker coatings deposited on the side walls 0:09:34 which can be leading to shorter maintenance intervals and higher maintenance costs and generally a 0:09:39 higher total cost of ownership for the user. So our solution is to use a few things that other 0:09:48 people don't. Um The first is a proprietary gas handling setup. We don't have details today about 0:09:55 that. A lot of that is confidential information but suffice to say that we move the gases in a very 0:10:01 novel way that enables them to get in and out very quickly while having enough time to do the L. D. 0:10:08 Reaction. We also have a lot of custom components that enable us to do that gas handling and we'll 0:10:13 get into those on the next few sides here. So when you combine that, you end up with one of the 0:10:19 lowest total cost of ownership systems um with very high chemical utilization and much longer 0:10:26 maintenance intervals. But the key here is that we're able to do all of this without sacrificing any 0:10:34 of the l decoding quality. 0:10:38 So in terms of components that enable this extremely fast low maintenance, low total cost of 0:10:45 ownership process and systems, we have several several key things. First the millisecond valves 0:10:52 which are high speed valves um secondly the high purity process controllers will cover both of those 0:10:58 on the next slide and then also L'D sources integrated abatement, hailed the manifold that's custom 0:11:05 and many other small details that add up to be significant differences and differentiators with our 0:11:12 equipment. And as I mentioned, we do this without compromising quality. So on the bottom here you 0:11:18 can see the wafer to wafer reproducibility and we have very high CP and CPK numbers. If you're not 0:11:23 familiar with those, the higher the better. Um, and Then within a way for uniformity. Again, we're 0:11:30 good. Typically anything over 1.7 or so is good there 0:11:36 on the left here is a small chart you can, you can kind of see if you squint closely enough. Um, but 0:11:41 basically this chart is saying that our systems have an extremely fast purge, um, and they have a 0:11:48 very high chemical utilization. 0:11:53 So as I mentioned, the two main components that enable our equipment to be so competitive are the 0:11:59 valves, we make these ourselves, these have a less than one millisecond response time which is much 0:12:06 faster than the next best available valves that you can get from from companies in the market. Um 0:12:13 And also we've tested these valves for over a 100 million cycles. That that is 100 million opening 0:12:21 and closing of these valves and that was at 20 hertz and that is the number of cycles we can get to 0:12:27 before the valve needs to be refurbished and it can be refurbished, it doesn't need to be replaced, 0:12:32 it can just be taken apart, cleaned, refurbished to put back together secondly, the process 0:12:37 controllers that we have really are replacements from mass flow controllers. They're much better and 0:12:43 there are many details even I don't understand here but suffice to say that combining our pressure 0:12:49 controllers with our valves enable us to have the best equipment. 0:12:55 So to summarize my talk um L. D cap technology is a 14 and a proprietary process that is replacing 0:13:02 silicon nitride in parallel encodings for various applications. For now, systems are the lowest 0:13:08 total cost of ownership systems. That means the lowest dollar per wafer or lowest dollar per object 0:13:14 costs throughout the lifetime of the equipment. And we account for absolutely everything that you 0:13:19 would ever need to spend money on in terms of maintenance, scheduled or otherwise facilities, labor, 0:13:25 materials, Capex depreciation, everything's in there. So if you're interested in hearing more about 0:13:32 these systems or wildcat process, Please reach out to us at sales at 4th nano.com. So with that, I'd 0:13:40 like to thank you so much for listening and thank you again to the organizers of this great 0:13:43 conference and I look forward to seeing you in person next year. Thank you so much.
