EV Group (EVG), a supplier of wafer bonding and lithography equipment for the MEMS, nanotechnology and semiconductor markets, today announced that the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research Technology (SMART) has ordered an EVG 850LT fully automated production bonding system designed for silicon-on-insulator (SOI) and direct wafer bonding using low-temp plasma activation processing. SMART, which is a leading research center established by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in partnership with the National Research Foundation of Singapore, will utilize the EVG850LT system to support its advanced substrate development efforts.
The MIT research center is located outside the United States in Singapore and has five different research groups, including the Low Energy Electronic Systems (LEES) Research Group, which focuses on integrating silicon CMOS and compound semiconductor materials to enable new integrated circuits (ICs) for wireless devices, power electronics, LEDs, displays and other applications. The LEES Research Group features a fabrication facility, where the EVG850LT has already been installed and is in use.
According to Professor Eugene Fitzgerald from MIT’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering, SMART chose the EVG850LT for the center’s advanced R&D efforts due to the system’s high process flexibility and performance, EVG’s experience in low-temperature bonding, and expertise and support in process development.
“The charter of our LEES Research Group is to identify new IC technologies that enable devices that consume less power, enable higher performance and open up new applications for information systems. EV Group’s technology and expertise will play an important role in supporting this effort,” stated Professor Fitzgerald.
The EVG850 platform, upon which the EVG850LT system is built, is the only SOI and direct wafer bonding platform designed to operate in high-throughput, high-yield environments—establishing it as the industry standard in the SOI wafer bonding market. The EVG850LT platform combines all essential steps for wafer bonding—from cleaning and alignment to pre-bonding and IR-inspection—in a single platform. This ensures an ultra-clean production process throughout all stages to enable high-yield, void-free wafers, as opposed to stand-alone processing units that require the wafers to be manually transported in a regular cleanroom environment. The EVG850 supports a variety of advanced substrates, including SOI and silicon on lattice engineered substrate (SOLES) technology, up to 300mm in diameter.