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The increasing demands for wireless communication
and optical broadband equipments have sparked the concurrent growth
of the Group III-V compound semiconductor industry due to the high
electron mobility, high breakdown voltage, high temperature tolerance,
light-emitting and anti-radiation characteristics of the Group III-V
compound semiconductor.
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Among the developments, optical
communication network emphasizes on components that can drastically
lowering the system implementation costs, such as Ethernet optical
transceiver, VCSEL or components that can effectively expand
the system bandwidth, such as tunable laser light source, optical
switches will have the greatest market potentials. On the wireless
communication components development front, domestic companies
in Taiwan emphasize mainly on HBT, pHEMT power amplifiers applications
suitable for mass production. |
| The key to high product
yields during the fabrication process is GaAs wafer's fragile
nature during the drilling, bonding, etching, and transport
stages when the back grinding thickness reaches 100 mm. This
is also the main contribution why most of the 6-inch GaAs
fabrication process failed to break the 70% yield bottleneck.Thus,
the equipment selection for the Group III-V foundry industry
has a tendency toward silicon wafer grade equipment, mostly
because such equipments had went through silicon semiconductor
mass production with relative high quality standard. Unfortunately,
foreign equipment manufacturers have turned their focus to
the development of high-price 12-inch silicon wafer equipments,
which fails to meet the development needs for the Group III-V
industries. This inevitably provides a niche market for domestic
semiconductor equipment manufacturers with lower cost, high
quality products and better service efficiencies. Furthermore,
the market potentials for 6-inch consumer ASIC foundries in
Mainland China cannot be ignore. |
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AST Inc.is thus providing the following new series of Group III-V
semiconductor front-end manufacturing equipments:
(1) ICP-RIE(Inductively Coupled Plasma Reactive
Ion Etching)¡]DBR, GaN, InP¡^
(2) E-Beam Evaporator¡]Lift-Off process¡^
(3) PECVD(Plasma Enhanced Chemical Vapor
Deposition)¡]SiO2, Si3N4¡^
(4) Plasma Asher
(5) Magnetic Enhanced Sputter¡]SiO2, ITO,
Metal¡^
(6) Resistance Heating Evaporator
(7) Wafer Bonding System
After synchronized with international technical advancements, AST
Inc. will shift the R&D strategy to the development of innovative
products with leadership market positions to generate market demands.
Using indigenous design capability combines with manufacturing testing
and process integration advantages to build customized, high-quality,
low-cost products based on customer needs with emphasis on modular
and mass-production products. |
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