EVG Wafer Bonding Machine Alignment Accuracy Improved to 50nm

PRNewswire: EV Group (EVG) unveiled the SmartView NT3 aligner, which is available on the company's GEMINI FB XT integrated fusion bonding system for high-volume manufacturing (HVM) applications. The SmartView NT3 aligner provides sub-50-nm wafer-to-wafer alignment accuracy—a 2-3X improvement—as well as significantly higher throughput (up to 20 wafers per hour) compared to the previous-generation platform.

Eric Beyne, imec fellow and program director 3D system integration says "area of particular focus is wafer-to-wafer bonding, where we are achieving excellent results in part through our work with industry partners such as EV Group. Last year, we succeeded in reducing the distance between the chip connections, or pitch, in hybrid wafer-to-wafer bonding to 1.4 microns, which is four times smaller than the current standard pitch in the industry. This year we are working to reduce the pitch by at least half again."

"EVG's GEMINI FB XT fusion bonding system has consistently led the industry in not only meeting but exceeding performance requirements for advanced packaging applications, with key overlay accuracy milestones achieved with several industry partners within the last year alone," stated Paul Lindner, executive technology director, EV Group. "With the new SmartView NT3 aligner specifically engineered for the direct bonding market and added to our widely adopted GEMINI FB XT fusion bonder, EVG once again redefines what is possible in wafer bonding—helping the industry to continue to push the envelope in enabling stacked devices with increasing density and performance, lower power consumption and smaller footprint."