WHS 300 series Wafer Handling System

With wafers becoming thinner, more fragile and increasingly difficult to handle safely, the global demand for more secure, and efficient shipping methods has grown substatnially. the semiconductor fabs produce wafers which need to be handled, sorted, packed or unpacked as well as documented to be shipped to different manufacturing facilities in front-end, back-end or external customers.

Tighter package tolerances, greater cost savings and virtually no chipping or breakage of wafers are the requirements of the semiconductor industry.

To serve this cost and quality conscious market worldwide, Ricmar is now offering the Wafer Handling System Series 300. The WHS 300 series is modular system which provides the fully automatic sorting, packing and unpacking of wafers with the lowest cost of ownership, smallest footprint and complete traceability.

The Wafer Handling System (WHS) Series 300 is unique in providing an extremely smart design and very small footprint. The flexible system is configurable from 3 to 7 configurable load ports depending on the type of the machine WHS 303, WHS 305 or WHS 307 and configuration.

The WHS is also designed to serve as an input/output device for loading wafers into the process tool, or any chuck and communicates with the host server. The systems include all communication functionalities between different OEM tools suchs as SECS-GEM, ASCII, TCPIP, SMEMA which are used within the semiconductor industry. High reliability is guaranteed due to low particle generation by using a high-speed maintenance free clean class 1 robot.

The machine is equipped with BOLTS interfaces, allowing for the integration of all commercially available, as well as, custom load port types plus optionally a Ricmar Packer Load Port.

The pre-aligner is integrated into the Wafer Handling System platform and delivers exact X/Y alignment of 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 arm, providing fast and highly accurate map of the wafers in the cassettes for complete traceability independently from cassette type.

Optionally, the system can be equipped with, green light inspection and ionizer, fan filter unit, a.s.o.

The system is capable to run 200mm and 300mm wafers corresponding conversion kits for 150mm are available as options, all known interleaf/foam materials and different end-effector types (HVF Vacuum, Taiko, Bernoulli,..) can be used depending on the customer application.

The Wafer Handling System Series 300 provides the highest possible throughput. This depends on the configuration and method used to hold the substrates. Ricmar's application team will be available to analyze your requirements and substrates to find the most cost efficient and fastest method of solving your handling/sorting/packing needs.

The equipment can be used to pack and/or unpack wafers from cassettes into canisters (flat packs), and pack/unpack from cassettes/canisters to and from jars or pack to pack sequences and has full sorting and handling capabilities.