Palm-sized high performance vision sensor identifies and tracks wafers through the semiconductor manufacturing process.

Cognex, the world's leading supplier of machine vision systems to the semiconductor industry, today introduced a new high performance vision sensor for identifying and tracking wafers through the semiconductor manufacturing process. The palm-sized In-Sight 1701 is an enhanced version of Cognex's industry-leading In-Sight 1700 wafer reader, offering the most advanced optics technology ever available for reading identification scribes on wafers. 'As the need to identify wafers at virtually every step of the manufacturing process becomes essential, wafer readers must offer a high degree of mounting flexibility without any compromise in reading performance,' said Peter Neve, Director of Marketing, International Operations for Cognex.

'With its revolutionary new optical system, the 1701 delivers the best wafer images possible, regardless of how close or far away the reader is positioned from the wafer.

This makes it the ideal choice for those who need the reliability of Cognex wafer ID technology in a package that can be easily integrated with a variety of process equipment types, including handlers, probers, and other tools.' With its unique optical system, the 1701 is able to provide the largest area of illumination ever available in a wafer reader.

This enables the 1701 to image heavily degraded marks on wafers, even if the wafers are misaligned due to mechanical pre-alignment errors.

Like the In-Sight 1700, the 1701 wafer reader offers robust, reliable reading performance, utilising advanced OCR, 2D matrix, and bar code recognition algorithms to read soft-marked, super-soft-marked, or hard-marked SEMI standard codes on the front or back side of a wafer.

These algorithms also provide exceptionally high read rates on wafer marks that have been affected by CMP, edge beads, copper metalisation, blue nitride coating, and other process effects.

The 1701 also features an intuitive graphical user interface for easy set up and modfication, image 'tuning' capabilities that automatically balance lighting and image filters for optimal read settings, and built-in network and serial communications for connectivity to other process tools and/or the fab network.