Laura Peters

What's With the Name?
June 16, 2008

Welcome to the debut of my very own blog, the Float Zone. Float zone wafers first came about in the 1960’s as a manufacturing method for fabricating very pure silicon. In the process, a polysilicon rod with a seed crystal at the bottom is held in vertical position. A small zone is kept molten by and is moved upward so the floating zone traverses the length of the rod. Impurities coalesce in the molten region rather than the solidified region, allowing very pure silicon crystal fabrication after the molten region has passed. But this growth technique has been surpassed by the cheaper alternative, Czochraski growing, for most applications. However, float zone wafers have a key niche due to their high resistivity, very low defectivity and low oxygen content, making them ideally suited for power devices, some high efficiency solar cells and RF/wireless communication chips.

I chose the name Float Zone because I want this blog to be a place for vital exchange of ideas on topics that matter to you, our readers. I plan to float ideas out for consideration and I hope you will come to see this zone, and really all of SI’s blogs, as places to exchange ideas, not just getting one side of a multifaceted story.

Floating on the internet, I learned that FZ wafers were used in chips for the Hubble telescope and Galileo spacecraft, and they will be used in the Genesis solar wind sampling project. As we take Semiconductor International and semiconductor.net on its voyage into this next era of semiconductor and solar cell manufacturing, I look forward to hearing your ideas as to where the frontiers of science will take us next.

Posted by Laura Peters on June 16, 2008 | Comments (0)