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DAPike Engineering capabilities improved with addition of high power microscope
The addition of a high power microscope substantially adds to DAPike Engineering’s skillset. The high resolution system can measure critical dimensions down to 1 um. The following photos demonstrate the capability.
This allows us to document the dimensions of photo masks on the various layers of an Integrated Circuit or measure the sizes of defects found on silicon wafers. These high resolution photos can be very helpful when trouble shooting yield issues or setting up processes during process development.
Please contact us if you need this service.
Customer visits in San Jose, CA
Last week, I visited with two clients, a silicon foundry and one potential customer during a busy business trip to San Jose, CA. The clients were Semefab, Ltd and AllWin21, for whom I am sales representatives. These successful companies; Semefab which has a growing business in wafer production with MEMS devices a key growth area and AllWin21, located in beautiful Morgan Hill, which has an excellent product line of Plasma and RTP wafer processing tools.
In addition, I visited the 4″ silicon foundry which I recently selected to produce my customer VerAvanti’s chip. The engineering manager and I inspected several of these MEMS wafers and confirmed the process is under control. Next on the schedule was Isolink a potential customer and the manager who is an old friend which could turn out to be a great source of future 6″ foundry wafers for Semefab. All in all, a great trip was enjoyed to the green hills of the Bay Area.
Wafer Fab Equipment Installation
I traveled to Kokomo, Indiana during the last week of January to help a world class 8″ wafer foundry install a deposition tool. This was a challenging assignment as the deposition tool manufacturer has been out of the business for 15 years and the tool was in large pieces wrapped in plastic wrap when I arrived. The process engineer Chris and I got off to an excellent start and managed to boot the IBM OS2 computer and verify operation of the computer programs required to operate the tool. This entailed running extension cords and stretching the cables to interface with various random components like 20 year old ELO touchscreens. Progress was made for the short duration of time I was there and I’ll be back again when the tool is ready to start up sometime in May.
All in all some new friendships started and a successful business trip was completed. The food was excellent in Kokomo and started with a New York strip and ended with Sockeye Salmon cooked on Chris’s outside grill in sub 20 degree weather on his deck which has been shoveled out numerous times. I hope the weather will be much more hospitable than sub zero temps from my Jan trip when I return in May!
dougpike1 