Clean room monitoring system APR 4300

environmental

The APR 4300 decontaminates 300 mm wafers and their transport boxes (FOUPs) on a molecular level and protects them during queue time. Reliable decontamination and protection from contamination The APR is a system for the decontamination of wafers and the protection during queue time. Airborne Molecular Contamination (in short AMC) lowers the yield and quality in the semiconductor production. The APR effectively prevents the adsorption of contaminated organic or inorganic molecules on the surface of a wafer and the transport box. Through the evacuation of chambers in the APR, the adsorption probability is reduced massively. The yield of a fab can be increased significantly in this way and the queue times between the individual process steps can be optimized. How does APR work? The FOUP can be delivered either manually or through overhead hoist transportation (OHT) on the two load ports. The APR is a system with four stacked vacuum chambers for the decontamination of wafers and FOUPs, which is served from a reliable robot. All chambers are equipped with a vacuum pumping station, a gas box, an operating panel and a control with power supply. The chambers can be operated individually. After loading the chamber with a FOUP containing wafers, the pressure in the chamber is reduced to < 0,1 mbar. Then the decontamination process is applied. After this, the chamber is purged with clean nitrogen and returned to atmospheric pressure. The wafers and the transport box are now protected from contamination for more than one day.