AWP 200 - Wafer Packer

With wafers becoming thinner, more fragile, and increasingly difficult to handle safely, the global demand for more secure, and efficient shipping methods has grown substantially. Wafer manufacturers can no longer rely on traditional methods of transporting wafers in bulky H-bar cassettes or SMIF Pods. It not only adds to already mounting transportation costs, but also results in higher breakage rates enroute.

As a more reliable alternative, most fabs today ship thinned wafers to their offshore assembly sites in streamlined canisters (also known as flat packs). With their much tighter package tolerances, the addition of protective interleafs between the wafers, and foam padding top and bottom even today‘s thin wafers are protected and shipped with greater cost savings and virtually no chipping or breakage.

To serve this cost and safety conscious market worldwide, Ricmar is now offering the state-of-theart AWP 200 wafer packing and unpacking tool. In addition to a wide array of basic features, the AWP 200 includes important sorting functions, OCR/BCR reading, and SECS/GEM capability.

The AWP 200 is based on Ricmar‘s RWS series of wafer sorters, rigorously proven in the field and designed around the ROB 320 series robot. There are two multi-tasking robots accessing the input or output cassettes, an additional cassette is often used as reject station, as well as the canister and the pre-aligner in the wafer packing and unpacking sequence, all with impressive precision and speed.

The SPA prealigner delivers exact X/Y alignment on the wafer. This includes flat notch positioning of the laser scribes so they may be read using an OCR/BCR vision system for wafer identification. A class 1 laser scanning system resides on the robot‘s upper link arm, providing fast and highly accurate map of the wafers in the cassettes.

The software has been developed from a second generation of the Sorter Manager Software that aggressively controls and tracks all material handing. It allows for wafer transfers in manual, automatic, and host modes using the optional GEM/SECS software. Modes of operation are fully programmable by the user.

To ensure safe handling of the wafers during any facility failures, an uninterruptible power supply (UPS) and vacuum back up are in place to prevent wafer damage and data loss. Above all, the tool is fully CE, S2 and S8 qualified.

The AWP 200 has several working modes. It can be used to pack and/or unpack wafers from H-bar cassettes into canisters (flat packs), and pack/unpack from cassettes/canisters to and from wafer jars. Additionally, the AWP 200 has full wafer sorting capabilities. Some of the working modes include merging, splitting, direct transfers, and randomizing of the wafers.

Without modifications, the system is capable to run 150 mm and 200 mm wafers. The tool uses a PC running a Windows™ operating system to ensure its speed and reliability.

What‘s more, the tool is fully SECS/GEM/HSMS compliant. The Sorter Manager software‘s ease-of-use and set up allows the user to take advantage of the AWP 200‘s many convenient options. Recipes run at the touch of ten easy-to-access programmable hot buttons, making the total operation a troublefree, one-touch solution.