Quartz crucibles are round crucible-shaped quartz glass products of different sizes. They have the advantages of very few bubbles (inner layer), extremely high purity of silicon dioxide and high melting point. They are used for single crystal silicon rods required for the CZF process to pull chips and photovoltaic industries.
In the semiconductor industry, quartz crucibles have high requirements for the impurity content of alkali metals and transition metals. Alkali metal impurities will affect the thermal properties of quartz crucibles, reduce the temperature resistance of quartz products, reduce their melting point, and deteriorate high-temperature performance; transition metal impurities will reduce conductivity and shorten the service life of semiconductors. High impurity content will also produce defects such as bubbles and color spots, reduce the transparency of quartz crucibles, and in severe cases affect the molding of quartz crucibles.
In order to improve production efficiency and reduce costs, the evolution to larger sizes is the development direction of semiconductor silicon wafer manufacturing technology. The larger the size of the silicon wafer, the more chips can be manufactured on a single silicon wafer, and the cost per chip will decrease accordingly. At the same time, making rectangular chips on a round silicon wafer will make some areas at the edge of the silicon wafer unusable, which will inevitably waste some silicon wafers. The larger the size of the silicon wafer, the smaller the loss at the edge of the silicon wafer will be, which is conducive to further reducing the cost of the chip.
Semiconductor silicon wafers are constantly developing in the direction of larger sizes, from the initial 2 inches to the current 12 inches, and may develop to 18 inches in the future, and the proportion of available area of silicon wafers will gradually increase. This also prompts silicon single crystal silicon materials to further develop in the direction of defect-free, large size, high uniformity and structural integrity.
In the future, the continued increase in demand for large-size silicon wafers will drive the scale of semiconductor quartz crucibles to further grow. With the continued growth in shipments of 8-inch and 12-inch semiconductor silicon wafers, the corresponding demand for 24-inch and 32-inch semiconductor quartz crucibles continues to increase.