On December 24, Tokyo Electronics, a large Japanese semiconductor manufacturing equipment manufacturer, announced that it will release the cleaning machine "CELLESTA SCD" in January 2021. This product has a drying function that can increase the yield of cutting-edge semiconductors. By increasing the drying process using "supercritical fluid" (essentially no surface tension), the microstructure on the semiconductor is prevented from being destroyed. This cleaning machine will be used in the cutting-edge semiconductor manufacturing of "miniaturization" and "multilayering". "Microfining" means reducing the circuit line width, and "multilayering" means stacking circuits in the height direction.
According to a report on the "Nihon Keizai Shimbun" website on December 18, the new product is equipped with a special reaction chamber for supercritical drying in the CELLESTA series of Tokyo Electron's leaf cleaners, and will be used to manufacture logic semiconductors with increasingly refined and complex structures. And semiconductor memory DRAM used in personal computers.
It is reported that the use of supercritical fluids can reduce the risk of the fine pattern structure being damaged by the surface tension of the liquid during drying. The new product uses supercritical fluid instead of alcohol as cleaning fluid in the drying process.