News: Suppliers
5 June 2026
Covalent expands wafer-level characterization through Oxford Instruments collaboration
Covalent Corp of Sunnyvale, CA, USA has announced a strategic collaboration with UK-based Oxford Instruments that expands its semiconductor characterization offering with customer-ready, wafer-level Raman and photoluminescence (PL) workflows. The capability is now available to customers tackling defectivity, stress and strain mapping, process development, and failure analysis at full-wafer scale.
As materials such as silicon carbide (SiC) and gallium nitride (GaN) move into high-volume production, teams increasingly need non-destructive, spatially resolved insight across entire wafers. Historically, these measurements have been limited in throughput, accessibility or scale. Covalent’s integrated workflows now make it faster and more practical to generate high-resolution Raman and PL data across wafers up to 300mm, enabling users to identify defects earlier, correlate material properties, and accelerate development cycles.
Through the collaboration, Covalent has incorporated Oxford Instruments WITec360 Raman technology into its application-driven environment, configuring the system with dual 355nm and 532nm laser excitation. This approach enables complementary surface-sensitive PL analysis alongside high-resolution Raman imaging within a unified workflow, supporting a broader range of compound semiconductor and advanced materials challenges.
For customers, the impact is practical: faster root-cause analysis, more reliable process monitoring, and improved confidence in scaling new materials and devices. Wafer-level mapping of crystallinity, doping, stress and defects can now be performed in a single, integrated workflow designed around real production and R&D needs rather than standalone instrumentation.
“This is about expanding what our customers can do, not just what we can measure,” says Covalent’s CEO Craig Hunter. “We’ve taken Oxford Instruments’ powerful Raman technology and built it into workflows that directly support yield improvement, process control, and failure analysis at wafer scale.”
Oxford Instruments’ role is foundational to enabling this capability. “Our Raman platforms are built to provide fast, high-resolution, non-destructive insight into complex semiconductor materials on wafer sizes up to 300mm,” says Vahan Tchakerian, senior VP of sales & applications at Oxford Instruments. “By partnering with Covalent, we’re helping customers to bridge the gap from R&D to high-volume production, accelerating both development and manufacturing outcomes.”
By combining Oxford’s Raman platform with Covalent’s material characterization expertise and application development, customers now have access to a more scalable and commercially useful approach to wafer-level analysis.
