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Mike Brask of IPS explores the shift toward automated chemical dosing in wet process lines for enhanced control, safety, and product reliability. Mike emphasizes that automating chemical dosing reduces variability, ensuring consistent quality and safer working conditions. He notes past reliance on manual labor and highlights current challenges, including space limitations and regulatory hurdles. He also underscores the importance of process control and environmental considerations in adapting to automation, which is essential for meeting the demanding standards of semiconductor and substrate technology manufacturing.
Marcy LaRont: Mike, IPS’ wet process lines contain cutting-edge technology for better control to address higher technologies. What can you tell us about chemical dosing?
Mike Brask: To have good process control and repeatability part to part, you must start reducing variables in the manufacturing equation. Some of the easiest to eliminate are the variations in the chemical compositions in your baths. Metering and measurement systems allow you to dose chemicals so that the process maintains optimum levels for more reliable and consistent quality. Significant safety benefits are introduced by automating chemical handling. You create a better and safer working environment.
In the past, it was easier to hire someone to stand at the line in a smock with a drum pump and fill plating tanks from 55-gallon drums of chemicals. Some operators did this job for their entire careers. Today, our industry has contracted. We are bringing new talent into the industry; they don't want that job. Engineers don’t want to work the drum pump. Young workers expect to hit a button to control something like that. So, when you look at staff retention, chemical dosing in your wet process matters. You must create a better working environment that keeps the shop clean, and the more you can can automate this task, the more it helps with staff retention and safety and reduces the risks of mistakes when making up new process tanks.
LaRont: The fact that businesses should be looking at these elements in terms of getting and keeping a workforce, not just because of the process control element, is quite a commentary on where we are.
Brask: If you think about chemical distribution and bulk handling of chemistry, you don't want to have blue drums sitting around or risk someone getting hurt because a hose flew out or from a chemical spill. All that gets eliminated with a chemical management system. Your lab is not making up the bath for you anymore. You're doing that in a controlled and precise way. The lab is merely verifying its accuracy. You adjust your dosing to reduce that hysteresis between tanks.
To read this entire article, which appeared in the August 2024 issue of PCB007 Magazine, click here.
