[labnetwork] An R&D FOUP

[Christopher Raum]

Hi all,

I work between two fabs at UC Berkeley and part of my process flow involves
shuttling wafers between those two fabs to their respective tools.

Currently I use a wafer box and double bag to ensure the wafers aren't
contaminated by the environment outside the two fab labs. This is generally
standard practice for transporting wafers outside a cleanroom.

But there are more complicated concerns. For example one fab lab has a
wetbench used to remove native oxide from wafers, and when the next tool in
the flow is in the same fab, I can minimize the regrowth of native oxide -
but when I need to transfer between fabs regrowth can become an issue.

In industry they use a FOUP (Front Opening Unified Pod) to move wafers
around while controlling the environment the wafers sees. The pods can be
purged with nitrogen (and perhaps placed under vacuum?) and I think they
can also be light tight to allow PR coated wafers to be transported in
unfiltered light.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOUP

Since it's the industry that uses FOUPs, all the systems are for 12" and
above wafers. I know I could never be so lucky, but I'll ask anyway - does
anyone know of any FOUP systems that are fitted for six inch wafers?

Outside that possibility, my ask for the community is: Is there an interest
in developing such a system? Some sort of crowdsourcing? There are many
members of industry in this mailing list and I'm sure there would be quite
a few academic and research customers if someone wanted to develop and
fabricate such a wafer transportation system.

I hope this post stimulates some interesting discussion.

-Chris
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