An article written by our colleague Chris Edwards for News Electronics:
The encroachment of glass into mainstream production has been slow up till now, but could the push to deliver higher throughput more cheaply see the material have a bigger role to play?
For more than half a century, high-purity silicon has dominated the world of IC production. It’s a material that has almost everything.
Silicon is not just an effective semiconductor, it is mechanically strong. That is in direct contrast to many of the III-V materials that offer high performance but are much more fragile.
Sapphire provides strength and excellent electrical isolation, but is difficult to integrate into manufacturing economically. As a result, materials such as gallium nitride that are useful in high-brightness LEDs and power devices, have shifted from sapphire to silicon wafers.
A challenger is emerging but even that is based on silicon. Tweaks to the chemistry and manufacturing processes are now making glass a powerful contender.
One advantage that glass has is that it works well as a companion to silicon, making it possible to tune manufacturing processes and experiment with novel ways to eat into adjacent markets.
According to the market analyst firm, Yole Développement, the biggest use of glass as a substrate is in microfluidics and it is likely to stay that way into the early 2020s even as other uses develop for the material.
Although polymers such as polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA) have become popular for lab-on-a-chip devices, because they can be cheaper to process, many applications cannot use them because solvents and reagents are more likely to attack them. Glass and pure silicon are far less likely to react.
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Image: Interposers made at Georgia Tech
Source: http://www.newelectronics.co.uk
