Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1529988
16 SMT007 MAGAZINE I DECEMBER 2024 e established technology is laser removal. Lasers scan across and through the (transpar- ent carrier) plate, and the energy from the laser causes the adhesive to separate from the wafer, or the plate or the adhesive itself will vaporize. is is a pretty well-known technique. ere are a handful of companies that have provided these specific kinds of adhesive materials. From our customers, our material partners, and from our own testing we've learned that we can remove the wafer with a small number of stitched flash exposures instead of having to use a rastering pattern. We can just pop the wafer and/or com- ponents off at the same time. e LEDs don't have to go through individual pick-and-place. ey can be placed en mass where needed. That's a lot more effective. Furthermore, one of the byproducts of laser use is that laser beams create an ash residue which lingers on either the wafer or on the carrier glass. e ash is a contaminant and must be removed with some form of washing. e washing step is bad because that's another operation. Washing also increases the use of water in the semicon- ductor manufacturing process. Mind you, semi- conductor is a space desperately trying to use less water in the manufacturing process. How does that residue happen? It's because the uniformity of energy density across the small beam is a Gaussian shape; there are lit- tle edges where it's not quite as intense. When those edges cross the material, they don't bring all the material up to the clean removal temper- ature. ey're only partially cooked, in other words, which leaves an ash. e adhesion may have released as intended, but there's still a bit of residue there. Our tools don't have that. Photonic processing also has an edge effect, but it's a much larger overall uniform temper- ature process area. Inside this uniform area, everything gets to target temperature so there's no ash, and that means there's no contaminant or washing step, so the water consumption and time for processing the water wash goes down. All of that is a happy story. e combination of no ash, plus the throughput that we talked about, make for very compelling concepts. But the economics are really favorable as well. We have partnered with a couple compa- nies doing semiconductor integrations, and we are selling debonding tools into the semiconduc- tor space as a drop-in to existing semiconductor processes. We're not redesigning semiconduc- tors, rather we're working in an existing market space that is under some very intense geopolit- ical pressures right now, with massive invest- ments in new facilities, and upgrading previous facilities' capabilities. is is good timing for our tools to augment and make improvements.