To increase the supply stability of Au-containing materials for wafer packaging processes and enhance competitiveness, Thintech Materials Technology Co., Ltd. (Thintech) has partnered with research units and customers to jointly promote AuSn alloy material recycling technology.
Gold-tin (AuSn) materials play a key role in bonding high-power integrated circuits (ICs) to ceramic substrates. Due to the high price of gold, however, related process costs have increased sharply, weakening enterprise competitiveness. To this end, Thintech has collaborated with the Material and Chemical Research Laboratories of the Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) and Linco Technology Co., Ltd. to engage in technological development and verification. Together, they propose a complete, full-process gold recycling technology for reducing losses, thereby further reducing material purchase costs and enhancing competitive advantages.
Au process innovation with high recovery rate
Thintech has introduced a series of recycling technologies into factory and client processes. First, the scraps, shavings and residual targets (accounting for about 50% of the Au input) generated during the target fabrication process are directly placed into remelting production after chemical cleaning to achieve complete recycling. Secondly, the residual targets, sputtering baffles, masks and other spare parts, sputtering chamber materials, defective products (poorly coated substrates) and etching liquids produced during the customer’s fabrication process all contain gold elements, and can be recycled (accounting for about 48.58% of the Au input) after commercial arrangements are formed with the customer. The gold thus extracted can be purified using refining technology and then reused for the production of targets, realizing the recycling and reuse of gold in the wafer target manufacturing process.
Benefits
- Increase the recycling rate of Au to over 98%, which in turn saves NT$180 million in new material investment costs every year [1].
[1] Based on the annual supply of AuSn alloy targets of approximately 50 kilograms, approximately 100 kilograms of AuSn raw materials are required per year.