T
he world is experiencing an ongoing shortage of semiconductors; essential components which live inside all of our electronic devices. The scarcity of chips has arisen from an accumulation of factors ranging from pandemic-related backlogs, a growing demand for smart and connected devices, and the launch of next-generation products like electric vehicles, games consoles and mobile phones. If you tried to get your hands on a Nintendo Switch to escape the boredom of another lockdown, for example, your supply issues likely ran much deeper than the stock levels at your local Amazon warehouse. It follows months of discussion on supply chain, covered from the perspective of the AM industry in the last issue of TCT Magazine, triggered by the pandemic and the disruption it caused to traditional manufacturing operations. As AM stepped up to the plate in temporarily plugging critical supply chain gaps, it begs the question of whether the technology could have a similar part to play in solving the semiconductor supply challenge. “It’s an undiscovered, really interesting area for additive manufacturing that has the opportunity to affect everybody today because we all use smartphones, computers and drive cars,” Scott Green, Principal Solutions Leader at 3D Systems, tells TCT. “With the global semiconductor supply shortage, it’s going to be really interesting for a couple of years because there’s going to be a lot more machines produced than any of the major manufacturers thought, and they’re going to have to work a lot better, they’re going to have to work a lot faster to catch up to meet the demand.” While opportunities are indeed emerging, it’s not necessarily a new market for additive. At the 3D printing pioneer’s Leuven office in Belgium, major semiconductor equipment manufacturers are said to have been leveraging its direct metal printing for well over a decade. What
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began as a “secret metal printer” used to print parts as a service has matured to what Green described as “a couple of hundred” successful production projects. “There’s maybe ten areas in semiconductor capital equipment where we’re contributing regularly,” says Green, citing opportunities in lithography, wafer handling and metrology. Green also pointed to examples of recent large-format EUV (Extreme ultraviolet lithography) machines which can contain well over 100,000 parts. “The needs and challenges of the semiconductor fabrication industry today are directly aligned with what a direct metal solution offers,” Green says. “They have challenges where, in order to really push the limits of physics, you’ve got to totally eliminate uncertainty and noise inside of a system and really optimize all the parts of handling, cooling, fluid distribution, light collimation. It’s a very complex machine.” The design freedoms and part consolidation afforded by additive could offer a solution for parts like heat exchangers, gas manifolds and nozzles. Instead of having tens of components vibrating against each other in an assembly, you could potentially reduce the number of moving parts and links in your supply chain down to one. Benny Buller, however, CEO at VELO3D where a recent collaboration with Lam Research Corporation is seeing the company’s support-free metal AM technology used for the development of novel materials and applications, believes there are benefits to using additive in semiconductor machinery before you even get to design for AM (DFAM). In fact, for these applications, Buller argues, oftentimes it makes sense not to redesign at all. “When you are doing legacy parts that you are already producing in one way and just want
an identical replacement by additive, the barrier for qualification is much lower. When you have a lot of parts, it makes a big difference,” says Buller. “When you are consolidating an assembly, you have an opportunity to remove features that are not needed anymore and by doing so you can remove costs, you can reduce weight, you can make things better, that’s fine. But when you start having to redesign the system or the assembly so that you can manufacture, well that’s not fine, because now you’re driving yourself into a lot of risk.” When dealing with the precise chemistries, gases and temperatures expected by the semiconductor industry, those risks simply cannot be afforded. Those same complexities, however, Buller believes suit the capabilities of additive well. “These are the classical problems additive manufacturing is really good at,” Buller explains. “Control of heat, control of flow, whether it’s flow in gases, form of chemicals, whether it’s forming liquid flow, these are the places where additive manufacturing is really powerful.” One crucial area where AM does present a challenge, however, is cleanliness, a field Buller is familiar with having spent the early years of his career on the inspection side of the semiconductor space.
