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In mid-1994 Bob Lauf and Don Bible attended a SEMATECH workshop in Austin, Texas, hoping to promote their variable microwave furnace technology—previously licensed to Lambda Technologies—for future semiconductor wafer fabrication. In a technical session they learned interesting facts about SensArray's tool used by semiconductor manufacturers to determine whether silicon computer chips on wafers are being heated at a uniform temperature. They saw that the tool was dotted with sensors whose wires merge into a "cat's tail" plugged into a temperature measurement device. They heard that the physical connection limits wafer movement and that the wires could alter the temperature measurement. At the Austin airport, Lauf and Bible sketched a wireless wafer concept. Back in Oak Ridge, they wrote an invention disclosure along with Carl Sohns, who built a bread-board prototype of a wireless wafer. Tiny temperature sensors on this breadboard are wired to a control chip, which could wirelessly transmit temperature readings to a base station linked to the wafer furnace control system. A patent was issued in 1999. "This patent surfaced two years later when wireless technology blossomed and SensArray inquired about our technology," Lauf says. In 2001 SensArray licensed the ORNL patent and in 2004 sent the first royalty check to ORNL. In 2005 the SensArray Integrated Wafer won Semiconductor International and R&D 100 awards. By then many of these devices had been sold to the world's leading semiconductor manufacturers.
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Web site provided by Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Communications and External Relations |
