Lam Research recently introduced its Dextro, the world's first collaborative robot designed for semiconductor manufacturing equipment maintenance, and said that the robot has been used by many of the world's leading fabs.
The Dextro cobot is a mobile robotic arm unit located on a cart and controlled by a manufacturing technician or engineer to perform three key equipment maintenance tasks with the help of a variety of "hand tools":
2x more accurate than human hand when installing and compressing consumables;
Precise tightening of high-precision vacuum-sealed bolts, with up to 5% error rate when human employees perform this repetitive task by hand;
Any polymer build-up on the side walls of the chamber can be removed automatically without disassembling the lower chamber, a task that previously required heavy-duty respiratory protective equipment.
This means that Dextro can help fab engineers offload often time-consuming, error-prone, or dangerous maintenance tasks, improve overall process accuracy, reduce labor requirements, reduce waste, reduce downtime, and ultimately increase fab yield.
Lam says a single Dextro cobot can serve 50 to 100 Lam tool chambers and is currently available to support its Flex G/H series of dielectric etch tools, with expansion to other tools and applications starting in 2025.
Kim Young Ju, Vice President and Head of the Memory Etching Technology Team at Samsung Electronics, said:
When manufacturing equipment requires maintenance, it is essential to get the job done quickly and efficiently to avoid extended tool downtime and wasted costs.
Dextro's error-free maintenance helps drive improvements in production variability and yield. This is an exciting milestone for Samsung towards its own factory.