Why are mineral insulated heaters used in wafer production?

Our mineral insulated heaters or heating cable can be used for heating up various processes in the wafer production in semiconductor industry. The heaters can be used for example for rapid thermal annealing (RTA) that involves very fast heating of a wafer. But also for annealing furnaces, or other heat treatment systems, mineral insulated heaters can be very suitable.

What is a wafer?

Wafers are made out of thin sliced semiconductor material and used for the production of integrated circuits in electronics. During the fabrication of wafers, repeating processes create complete circuits (electrical or photonic). The circuits are build up in layers whereby clean rooms are needed to prevent contamination like dust. Various processes are used during the layering, for example, ultraviolet exposition and chemical vapour deposition. The wafer serves as the substrate to build the microelectronics upon. There are various types of substrates that can be used: silicon, gallium (GaAs) or organic substrates (oxygen, carbon and hydrogen).

On our product page you can read more about our MI heating solutions for Wafer heaters.