Temporary Clark School clean room opens

> The new Engineering College Clean Room has opened, meeting an urgent need for enhanced campus-wide fabrication capabilities. The room provides facilities to serve MEMS device fabrication as well as general micro/nano fabrication. This temporary facility is located in 0202 Energy Research Building within the Institute for Research in Electronics and Applied Physics (IREAP). The steering committee includes Assistant Professor Reza Ghodssi (ECE/ISR), Associate Professor Don DeVoe (ME), Assistant Professor Elisabeth Smela (ME) and Professor John Melngailis (ECE/IREAP).

The physical realization of the Clean Room was accomplished by Nolan Ballew, Tom Loughran, John Barry, Bill Grubb and the members of the Steering Committee. The Technical Manager of the Clark School Clean Room is Nolan Ballew, 301-405-1024, e-mail: nolanb@glue.umd.edu.

Equipment

--Contact photolithography: partly homemade based on a Oriel Optical platform, very flexible (up to 6" wafers and 7" masks), normally set up for 4" wafers and 5" masks.

--Contact photolithography: commercial EVG620 aligner, 0.5um front side alignment accuracy, front-to-back alignment also, 1um alignment for wafer- to-wafer bonding

--Hot plates and/or oven for resist baking

--Wafer-to-wafer bonder EVG501. companion to aligner, Temperature up to 550C Force up to 40kN (9000lbs), accommodates a variety of processes.

--Two spinners: one Headway, one Laurel

--Four chemical hoods, two of which have hepa filtered laminar flow, piranha, oxide (HF) and Al etches normally set up or available.

--Profilometer: Tencor, Alphastep 500

--Two Leitz Ergolux optical microscopes, one with 1um precision XYZ stage position readout.

--AJA Inc. RF&DC 3-target sputter deposition system, up to 6" wafers, large variety of target materials available.

--Oxide and poly growth furnace, single tube, 4" wafers (tubes are changed from oxide to poly growth) (another single tube furnace available, donated by LPS but not yet installed)

--Trion reactive ion etcher (RIE) with load-lock. Normally run with CF4 or oxygen; chlorine and boron trichloride also available

--STS Deep reactive ion etcher (DRIE), used to etch deep (100um or more) trenches in silicon with very high aspect ratio

--Not physically in class 1000 clean room but available: E-beam evaporator, Temescal (old) model 1800. 4 hearth, most metals available

--Strassbaugh chemical-mechanical polisher, 4" or 6" wafers

--Ball bonder, set-up with gold wire.

--Probe station, with I-V or C-V measurements.

Published October 12, 2003