News: Suppliers
3 March 2020
EVG establishes Heterogeneous Integration Competence Center
EV Group of St Florian, Austria – a supplier of wafer bonding and lithography equipment for semiconductor, micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) and nanotechnology and semiconductor applications – has established the Heterogeneous Integration Competence Center, which is designed to assist customers in leveraging the firm’s process solutions and expertise to enable new and enhanced products and applications driven by advances in system integration and packaging. These include solutions and applications for high-performance computing and data centers, the Internet of Things (IoT), autonomous vehicles, medical and wearable devices, photonics and advanced sensors.
The Heterogeneous Integration (HI) Competence Center combines EVG's wafer bonding, thin-wafer handling and lithography products and expertise, as well as pilot-line production facilities and services at its cleanroom facilities at EVG's headquarters in Austria, supported by the firm’s worldwide network of process technology teams. Through the HI Competence Center, EVG will help customers to accelerate technology development, minimize risk and develop differentiating technologies and products through heterogeneous integration and advanced packaging, while guaranteeing IP protection standards required for working on pre-release products.
“Heterogeneous integration fuels new packaging architectures and demands new manufacturing technologies to support greater system and design flexibility, as well as increased performance and lower system design costs,” says Markus Wimplinger, corporate technology development & IP director. “EVG’s new HI Competence Center provides an open-access innovation incubator for our customers and partners across the microelectronics supply chain to collaborate while pooling our solutions and process technology resources to shorten development cycles and time to market for innovative devices and applications enabled by heterogeneous integration,” he adds.
EVG has an extensive background in heterogeneous integration, providing solutions for this key technology trend for more than 20 years. Among these are: permanent wafer bonding (including direct fusion and hybrid bonding for 3D packaging and metal bonding) and die-to-wafer bonding with and without collective carriers for integration of III-V compound semiconductors and silicon as well as high-density 3D packaging; temporary bonding and debonding (including mechanical, slide-off/lift-off and UV laser assisted); thin-wafer handling; and innovative lithography technologies, including mask aligners, coaters and developers, and maskless exposure/digital lithography.
Advanced packaging milestones
In the field of permanent bonding, EVG pioneered the patented SmartView wafer-to-wafer alignment system more than 20 years ago, and has refined this technology over the years to support technology advances such as backside-illuminated CMOS image sensors (BSI-CIS) and, more recently, the first demonstration of sub-100nm wafer-to-wafer alignment overlay for hybrid bonding — enabling devices such as 3D BSI-CIS and memory-on-logic stacking. EVG developed the first temporary bonding systems for ultra-thin wafers as early as 2001, which are essential for 3D/stacked die packaging, as well as revolutionized low-temperature laser debonding for ultra-thin and stacked fan-out packages.
In lithography, EVG delivered the first UV molding solutions for high-volume production of wafer-level optics more than a decade ago, and has since led the proliferation of nanoimprint lithography (NIL) to high-volume manufacturing (HVM). The firm continues to break speed and accuracy barriers in mask alignment lithography for advanced packaging and, more recently, unveiled the first highly scalable maskless exposure technology, which addresses emerging requirements in HVM back-end lithography.
