Wafer Resizing Scenarios

Customer A is a designer of high-tech electronic hardware. Customer A’s product design requires a combination of advanced manufacturing technologies offered by two large wafer foundries. The first CMOS foundry only supports 300mm wafers while the MEMS foundry providing the downstream processing only has 200mm capability. After partial device fabrication in the 300mm CMOS foundry, all wafers are sent to MPE for resizing before transfer to the 200mm MEMS foundry. In this situation, MPE is an essential provider in Customer A’s supply chain.

Customer B has product made in a 300mm CMOS foundry. Customer B has access to a metrology tool (i.e. probe, roughness measurement tool, imaging/measurement station, etc.) which can provide valuable data needed for evaluating process quality. However, the tool only accepts 150mm wafers. Customer B can send a small lot of 300mm wafers to MPE for resizing. MPE can yield two 150mm wafers from each 300mm wafer to allow the customer to inspect a maximal amount of die from the parent wafer.

Customer C is a materials science research institute specializing in semiconductor processing. Customer C has limited fabrication abilities with an assortment of 100mm tools. Customer C plans to fabricate test devices on a bare SOI wafer with specifications that are only available in the 200mm size. The 200mm SOI wafer supplier can drop-ship the wafers to MPE for resizing.   MPE can provide Customer C with two 100mm wafers from each 200mm wafer.