ABB Clean Room Robots in Chip Fabs

Chip fabs moved from hand-carried wafers to robot cells. How ABB IRB 1200, IRB 1300 and IRB 4600 clean room robots fit as Samsung plans fab maintenance robots.

INDUSTRIAL ROBOTICS

Chat With Robot

9/22/20262 min read

The first chip fabs ran on people. In the 1970s and early 1980s, workers in bunny suits carried wafers between machines in plastic cassettes and loaded them by hand. Those same workers were the biggest source of dust in the room, and a flake of skin was enough to ruin a chip.

Two Intel workers in white clean room suits inside Fab 5 in 1981
Two Intel workers in white clean room suits inside Fab 5 in 1981

Intel employees in clean room suits inside Fab 5, 1981. Photo: Intel Free Press / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Wafers kept growing, to 300 mm across today, and a full carrier became heavy and very expensive to drop. Fabs responded with overhead transport rails and sealed carriers such as FOUPs and FOSBs. Wafers now move automatically inside the tools, but packing, unpacking and equipment maintenance still take a lot of human hands.

Analyst holding up a 450 mm silicon wafer
Analyst holding up a 450 mm silicon wafer

A 450 mm prototype wafer. Today's fabs run on 300 mm wafers. Photo: Intel Free Press / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

Integrator Easy Field Corporation used ABB robots for one of those manual jobs. A clean room version of the ABB IRB 1200 opens wafer shipping boxes and cuts away their anti-static bags, and an IRB 4600 moves loads between stations. Before that, staff did the unpacking by hand around the clock.

ABB IRB 1200 Clean Room robot unpacking a wafer shipping box
ABB IRB 1200 Clean Room robot unpacking a wafer shipping box

An ABB IRB 1200 Clean Room robot unpacking wafer shipping boxes in Easy Field Corporation's cell. Photo: ABB

Chipmakers now want robots for maintenance too. On September 1, Samsung set up a team to build AI robots for its chip plants, starting with equipment maintenance that contractors and on-site engineers handle today. Earlier this year at NVIDIA GTC it demonstrated a mobile robot handing inspection tools to a humanoid.

Technician in a full clean room suit working at a bench in a semiconductor clean room
Technician in a full clean room suit working at a bench in a semiconductor clean room

A technician at work in a semiconductor clean room at Jefferson Lab. Photo: Aileen Devlin / Jefferson Lab (public domain)

ABB makes clean room versions of several arms for this kind of work. The IRB 1100 and IRB 1300 clean room models are certified to ISO 14644-1, with sealed bodies and hygienic paint, and the IRB 1300 version meets ISO class 4. For heavier loads, the 40 and 60 kg IRB 4600 variants are certified to ISO class 5.

ABB robot arm next to a transparent wafer carrier
ABB robot arm next to a transparent wafer carrier

An ABB robot beside a wafer carrier in the same unpacking line. Photo: ABB

The end point is a fab that people rarely enter. That reaches homes too, because every phone and robot vacuum depends on chip supply. More automated fabs should make that supply less fragile, including for the processors inside the next generation of household robots.

ABB IRB 1300 Clean Room robot working over a line of fixtures
ABB IRB 1300 Clean Room robot working over a line of fixtures

The ABB IRB 1300 in its clean room version. Photo: ABB

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