Friday, November 4, 2022
Samsung use NCD ALD for wirebonding alternatives to expensive Gold
Monday, October 10, 2022
NCD’s ALD technology and equipment for oxidation barrier of copper-based substrates
Copper is a metal used widely as the main material of Printed Circuit Board (PCB) and Lead Frame. But it is required to protect the oxidation because copper is easily oxidized in the condition of humidity, temperature, and pH, etc.
Electroless Nickel Immersion Gold (ENIG), Organic
Solderability Preservative (OSP), Immersion Sn or Ag (ImSn or ImAg) is
generally used to prevent oxidation of opened copper area after Solder Masking
in PCBs. The lead Frame is protected from oxidizing by plating Au, Ag, Pd, and Ni
after Lead Frame forming.
Recently, many groups have studied about preventing
oxidation on the surface of copper by various corrosion protection layers of
ALD metal oxides. Especially, Appling Al2O3 layer to the oxidation barrier is
actively being researched.
< Surface images and TEM & EDS of Cu plates coated by ALD thin films after annealing test >
After depositing Al2O3 layers on Cu-plated plates with various film thicknesses and process temperatures, the oxidation and corrosion behavior of the coated copper was examined with different annealing times in the oven. There was no oxidation before annealing, but after annealing for 1hr, as the sample’s thickness lowered and process temperature decreased, the oxidation happened and increased gradually. There was no oxidation on the plates coated with 50~60 ALD cycles and at process temperatures of 70~100℃ after annealing for 5hr, and oxidation didn’t occur only in the case of 60 cycles and 100℃ after annealing for 24hr.
To analyze the change of the structure and confirm the oxidation
behavior, TEM and EDS were measured on 5 and 10nm Al2O3 coated Cu plates at 100℃.
The results showed that a thick Cu oxide layer was built by combining Cu coming
out through the 5nm Al2O3 layer and outer oxygen after annealing.
On the other side, in the case of depositing 10nm Al2O3 film,
the ALD layer was maintained after annealing, so Cu oxide layer wasn’t built on the
surface. Therefore it confirmed that 10nm ALD Al2O3 layer showed an excellent
corrosion barrier.
< ALD equipment for Lead Frame and PCB >
Copper-based PCBs and Lead Frames for semiconductors may have great properties to prevent humidity and oxygen by ALD-coated corrosion barriers.
NCD has high volume and large area ALD equipment and
technology for this kind of application. ALD tools for Lead Frames could be
used by adding a dedicated transfer module on the base of Lucida GSH Series. And
NCD has been developing new ALD equipment, Lucida GP Series, for large and
flexible PCB substrates. NCD would extend the new ALD application area continuously
through constant R&D.
Source:
http://www.ncdtech.co.kr/2018/bbs/board.php?bo_table=eng_board_05&wr_id=57
Monday, September 26, 2022
Wafer scale microwire (TMW) solar cell with 21.1% efficiency using NCD ALD tool (Lucida D200)
Crystalline silicon TMW solar cells are considered a potential alternative to conventional solar cells as these devices require thinner silicon wafers instead of the industry standard 160 µm thick wafers. “This could reduce manufacturing capital expenditure by 48% and module cost by 28%,” the Korean group claims.
A 10 nm-thick Al2O3 passivation layer was deposited on the front side of the wafer using ALD (Lucida D200, NCD) as reported in the publication below.
Choi, D., Hwang, I., Lee, Y., Lee, M., Um, H. D., & Seo, K. (2022). Wafer‐Scale Radial Junction Solar Cells with 21.1% Efficiency Using c‐Si Microwires. Advanced Functional Materials, 2208377.
Sunday, August 14, 2022
ALD IGZO application for Monolithic 3D Integration
LucidaTM S Series for semiconductor is a high throughput ALD system with thermal or plasma process for 300 mm wafers and is able to deposit various oxides (HfO2, ZrO2) and metals (TiN, TaN, Ru) with excellent property and film uniformity.
Source: www.ncdtech.co.kr
Wednesday, June 22, 2022
NCD supplied ALE and ASD equipment to Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd.
<Lucida M200PL Series ALD System>
Monday, May 2, 2022
NCD supplied additional ALD equipment for special protective coating
Tuesday, November 9, 2021
NCD Supplied new ALD equipment for protective coating of semiconductor equipment’s products
<Lucida GSH500>
Friday, July 2, 2021
Future foldable and flexible Display with NCD’s ALD encapsulation technology
LucidaTM
GD Series ALD
Friday, June 5, 2020
Thermal ALD IGZO Properties for LTPO TFTs by NCD
Recently applications of LTPO (Low Temperature Polycrystalline Oxide) TFTs have been increasing to save the powder consumption of mobile and wearable devices. LTPO TFTs are the device combining LTPS TFTs with fast speed and Oxide TFTs with low leakage current. That is, switching uses Oxide TFTs because of being on/off the light fast and operating uses LTPS TFTs due to changing display rapidly with control of the mount of light.
A lot of smart device manufacturers including Apple are using or will use LTPO displays for their latest smart watches because their power consumption can decrease ~40%. Also, many manufacturers like Samsung and Apple have actively been developing their high-end smart phones equipped with the LTPO displays to make the power usage optimized.
IGZO thin films used for Oxide TFTs have typically been processed by sputtering, but this method continuously has been showing lots of issues such as their bad thickness and composition uniformity, degradation of the physical and electrical properties due to plasma damage and the stability problem of targets. However using thermal ALD-IGZO, it is possible to deposit high quality thin films because of no plasma damage in process, low process temperature, and atomic scale controllability of thickness and composition.
It is possible to get exact target atomic compositions of IGZO thin films by controlling the ratios of ALD cycle of respective sources in thermal ALD. Therefore this method could show the superior device properties to that by sputtering because it enables to control easily and exactly the most suitable atomic composition for the respective device structure of customers.
NCD has been developing high throughput batch IGZO-ALD system with its creative technology enabled to adapt the target atomic composition for respective devices. NCD could provide the competitiveness of excellent quality and the high productivity for LTPO TFTs including IGZO thin films using Lucida GD Series ALD which could process many and large area substrates at once.
Source: http://www.ncdtech.co.kr/2018/bbs/board.php?bo_table=eng_board_05&wr_id=51
Thursday, March 26, 2020
NCD supplied two Lucida M300 ALD systems for R&D to KANC
These wafer process equipment have the specification below
1) System: Lucida M300PL-O, Lucida M300PL-M
2) Substrate: Wafer 300mm
3) Deposition Materials:
- Lucida M300PL-O: Al2O3, TiO2, ZrO2, ZnO, HfO2, Ta2O5
- Lucida M300PL-M: Co. Ru, W, Ir, TiN, TaN
KANC, which is the most prestigious institute of Korea on nanotechnology, is using Lucida M300PL to investigate cutting edge semiconductor development and promising applications in MEMS and IoT. So it will be expected that these systems will contribute very much to the development of high-end nanotechnology.
NCD will do best to be the best ALD equipment company with continuous R&D efforts.
Wednesday, January 15, 2020
Metal mask coating by ALD for reliable plasma process in PECVD
However, this plasma process has severe problems like plasma arcing or particle generation due to instability of electrical isolation between the metal mask and the showerhead as an RF electrode. Therefore it is required to deposit dielectric materials such as Al2O3, Y2O3, TiO2, MgO, ZrO2, etc. on the metal mask to prevent plasma damage.
Typically, the dielectric layer is coated by a sputtering method, also known as physical vapor deposition (PVD). However, this method is difficult to coat the metal mask uniformly with large area and complex structure as well as it has the disadvantage of requiring a thick deposition of several µm and multiple processes.
To obtain excellent electrical isolation properties of metal masks in the PECVD process, the atomic layer deposition (ALD) of Al2O3 thin film might be the best solution which enables getting uniform deposition on them with large area and complex structure.
ALD Al2O3 layers could give them remarkable electric isolation and great protection, even if the thickness is less than one ㎛. When 50nm ~ 200nm layers of Al2O3 deposited by NCD large-area demo tool on metal masks were applied to the PECVD process, there was no issues like plasma arcing or damage.
Images of metal mask coated by ALD with Al2O3 a) before (b) after
In fact, even though ALD Al2O3 has lots of advantages, the end customer has to consider of low throughput using general large-area ALD equipment. However, NCD’s Lucida GD Series for large-area ALD applications might be the most suitable equipment with superb productivity to provide superior protective layers to the metal masks from plasma issues in the PECVD process.
NCD has steadily developed large area and high throughput ALD equipment and technology. The applications for display, solar cell, and semiconductor fields have been already commercialized, and also NCD has worked hard to find use in special markets like excellent plasma protective coating on metal masks. NCD will aggressively respond to the development and then supply of ALD equipment, which customers would need for various industries in the future.
Wednesday, November 13, 2019
Improvement of the quantum efficiency of micro LED by ALD passivation
Micro LED of less than 10 µm size is required for displays needed high pixel per inch (PPI) but the quantum efficiency drop would occur by sidewall effect in the manufacturing process. Looking at the reason in detail, micro LED chips require separation of them by dry etching process and the sidewall effect reducing external and internal quantum efficiency happens not to optimize extraction of light by chemical contaminations and structural damages during the etching process.
Specially, the interest of productive ALD equipment has been gradually increased because of the excellent dielectric passivation by ALD Al2O3 thin films expecting to improve quantum efficiency.
NCD has been developing wafer based high throughput batch ALD system continuously enable to form high quality oxide passivation to improve the quantum efficiency of micro LED. By introduction of the system in production of micro LED, it could be expected to guarantee the productivity, high quality and performance reliability of high resolution micro LEDs for applications of AR/VR, flexible and wearable devices and extra-large displays.