The world is experiencing an ongoing shortage of semiconductors; those 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.”
This recent focus on semiconductor applications has arisen from the strategic roadmap outlined by 3D Systems CEO Jeff Graves last year to concentrate on "specific, high growth markets that really benefit from additive manufacturing". However, while opportunities are indeed emerging, it’s not necessarily a new market for additive nor 3D Systems. 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 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 optimise all the parts of handling, cooling, fluid distribution, light collimation. It’s a very complex machine.”
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3D Systems's DMP technology was used for this wafer table to optimise thermal management and improve the throughout and accuracy of semiconductor capital equipment. (Image credit: 3D Systems)
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.
“Additive manufacturing, compared to some other manufacturing technologies, has struggled delivering this level of surface cleanliness and this level of surface control,” Buller says of the intense cleanliness levels required at each layer on the semiconductor fabrication process. “When we are doing gas turbines or jet engines, they also care about surface finish but we are talking literally orders of magnitude difference ... [The semiconductor industry] cares about particles that are two nanometers in size. It’s a completely different level of cleanliness that they have to deal with.”
Current opportunities for AM lie primarily in semiconductor capital equipment. It’s “the ultimate high volume manufacturing technology” according to Buller, with billions of parts produced every month, but per a recent report in the Harvard Business Review, funding and building out a new semiconductor fab can take at least five years. AM could offer a solution.
“Additive manufacturing has a lot of value to this industry, both in the ability to make better processes and to make equipment that is capable of more uniform, more controllable processes, new ways to make things that were not possible before,” Buller says. “It allows for a more agile supply chain and it helps with shorter lead times.”
SCOTT CHERNIS
VELO3D is working in collaboration with Lam Research Corp to develop new 3D printing materials and applications for the semiconductor space. (Image credit: VELO3D)
There are however also specific opportunities in semiconductor devices themselves as Valentin Storz, General Manager of EMEA at Nano Dimension told TCT. Nano Dimension, a manufacturer of additive electronics systems, known for its DragonFly LDM technology which simultaneously deposits a dielectric polymer and nano-silver for circuitry, is said to operate between the worlds of PCB and semiconductor integrated circuits.
Storz says: “The whole story about IoT, Industry 4.0; everything will have an IP address and communicate. That means every part will become at some place connected and needs some circuitry, some antenna in it and with parts getting smaller and having new form factors, that’s a place for us.”
New opportunities, Storz offers, are those in 3D stacking of chips on top of each other or heterogeneous integration where different components such as circuitry, RF components, optics and potentially even cooling channels are integrated into one package.
Throughout these conversations, Moore’s Law, the notion that the number of transistors on a microchip doubles about every two years, was a common thread. While the trend appears to be flattening in the semiconductor space, innovation continues apace as manufacturers strive to add more complexity to smaller chips and demand for new devices flourishes. It’s here, looking at that five-year roadmap towards next-generation semiconductor fabrication, better geometries and more uniform processes, where AM could find its sweet spot.
“Additive manufacturing allows [manufacturers] to innovate in directions that they couldn’t innovate before,” Buller concludes. “The moment this is demonstrated, that you can get to the cleanliness and you can get to the manufacturing quality that is required to support that, this will be a floodgate.”
