Towards Zero-Defect Manufacturing in the Silicon Wafer Production Through Calibration Measurement Process: An Italian Case

In electronic devices, the number of transistors and components per unit of area is still significantly increasing. In this context, the quality of the substrate of these devices is consequently increasing, making stricter and more pervasive the quality controls that a silicon wafer undergoes during its production process. This issue is extremely important to be addressed to reduce costs in quality controls in production moving towards zero-defect manufacturing. The purpose of this paper is to reduce time and costs spent in calibration procedures of the instruments needed to measure the mechanical parameters of silicon wafers, by revising and standardizing the already adopted procedures. To address this goal, the extant literature, patents, and standard about procedures employed for measuring the mechanical parameters of silicon wafers are studied. The results are elaborated and applied to an industrial case study, the Italian branch of a Taiwanese manufacturing company. In particular, the focus of the case is on the Bow/Warp machine’s calibration which needs to be performed periodically to guarantee a correct measurement accuracy. Such calibration has strong implications for production efficiency and flow. The results are reported and discussed to highlight the key practical and theoretical implications.