New wafer handling system heading for 300mm fab in Dresden

Berkeley Process Control, a start-up chip equipment vendor announced its
wafer handling system has been chosen for the state-of-the-art Siemens
"SC-300" 300mm wafer fab in Dresden, Germany. Efforts to use
traditional wafer handling systems at the SC-300 fab have reportedly failed.
Those systems use notch aligners, indexers, robots and buffers, tied together
serially by multiple black box controllers and special software needs to be
written to get the controllers to talk to one another.

Reprogramming the robotic wafer handling systems can take hours and severely
impacts productivity at the plant where even a minor snafu in production can
cost millions in lost output. BPC claims its system reprograms a wafer-handling
robot in about 90 seconds, using touch-sensing technology and laser beam
sensors. The entire system is run by a single controller with a powerful RISC
processor and 100MB ethernet with e-diagostics. Pushing just one button lets the
system’s "Bxi" controller sense where everything is on the front-end
and the system programs the system virtually automatically within a few minutes.

BPC, while a newcomer in the chip equipment market, has been in the business
of automating high speed machines, using proprietary technology used in building
passenger jet air planes and in the manufacture of fiber optic cable. On March
14, BPC will ship a 13-station wafer handling system to SC-300 where it will be
integrated with wet chemistry tools from STEAG's.