Stop Wasting Watts in Your Wafer Process
Let’s be honest: in a fab, wasting power is basically just throwing money away. Most standard IR lamps are pretty inefficient. They radiate energy in every single direction—meaning half your power is just heading the wrong way, heating up the air or the machine frame instead of your product. We fix that with a bit of gold. Not for the look of it, but for the physics. By putting a high-purity gold layer on the back of the quartz envelope, we essentially force all that infrared energy to move forward. How it actually works Gold is a beast when it comes to infrared. It reflects over 98% of those wavelengths. Think of it like a mirror. When the tungsten filament kicks in, the gold layer catches the heat that would have gone backward and bounces it straight toward the wafer. The best part? You get more heat on the substrate without cranking up the electricity bill. You’re just using what you already have, but using it smarter. The trade-offs (because nothing is magic) This lets you hit your ramp-up temperatures way faster. Shorter cycle times, more wafers through the door. But here’s the thing: when you concentrate all that energy into a tight beam, the edges of the wafer feel it. If your zoning is off, you’ll end up with hot spots. You’ll want to make sure your cooling system can handle the redirected heat. And the gold layer has to be perfectly uniform—otherwise, you’ll see “striping” across your wafers, which is a headache nobody wants. Getting it into your fab We built these to be simple drop-in replacements for your current IR heaters. No need to redesign your whole setup. Once they’re in, you’ve got a choice. You can lower the operating voltage to make your lamps last longer, or keep the voltage where it is and just slash your processing times. It’s a simple way to get more work out of every single watt.