Part 5 - Fabrication 1 Flashcards
What is a top down approach?
Starting with a larger component and carving away material. Patterning and etching away material as in building integrated circuits.
What is bottom up approach?
Building something by assembling smaller components. Self-assembly of atoms and molecules, as in chemical and biological systems.
List popular top-down methods
Mechanical attrition
Lithography
Etching
Give the essential information for ball milling
Used to produce metallic and ceramic nanomaterials.
Equipped with steel balls that rotate with high energy inside a drum and then fall on the solid with gravity force and crush material
Give advantages of ball milling
Readily implemented commercially
Used to make CNTs
preferred method for making metal oxide NCs
Cheap
What is lithography?
The process of defining a geometric pattern into a thin layer of material called resist which is a radiation sensitive polymer.
Give the process of lithography
(1) resist layer is spin coated or sprayed onto the wafer
(2) radiation is impinging on the resist
(3) Radiation changes the solubility of the revisit in a known solvent so called a developer.
What does resolution mean?
The smallest feature that can be obtained with high fidelity
Define Alignment accuracy
How accurately can we align successive masks on top of one another
Define throughput
The number of wafers that can be exposed / hr
Describe 2 common lithographic techniques
Photolithography and electron beam lithography.
Photolithography uses uv light to imprint an image on a wafer
EBL uses a beam of electrons that move over the wafer and writes the image over the photoresist.
Give the equation for minimum feature size
MFS = gamma/NA
NA = numerical aperture of device.
What method can you use to get small minimum feature sizes?
you need to reduce wavelength (gamma) of impinging radiation. It is popular to use deep UV light (~100 nm) or using electron beam lithography (EBL) with very very small wavelength.
Give the equation to calculate min theoretical resolution of EBL
b(min) = 3/2 sqrt[gamma (s + d/2)]
Gamma = wavelength of exposing radiation s = gap width between mask and photoresist surface d = photoresist surface
What are the challenges of EBL?
Electron beam lithography:
Charging effect - complicates the exact focussing of electron beam, with displacement possible
Proximity effect - scattering of electrons in resist film and substrate resulting in unwanted additional exposure. Can collide with other electrons and backscattered. Ruins the resolution.
Takes a long time.
What method can be used to overcome the problems of EBL?
Focussed ion beam lithography.
What are the advantages of Ion Beam Lithography
IBL ions have heavier mass than electrons Less proximity effect Less scattering effect High resolution Even smaller wavelength than E-beam.
What is the purpose of etching?
Removes material from areas identified by the lithography process
Creates structures for functional use
Remove oxide layers below features to allow for motion.
Define etch rate
the amount of material removed from the wafer over a defined time
Define uniformity
The evenness of the removal over the entire surface of water. Taking measurements across the wafter and the thickness should be the same. U = max-min/mean
Define Isotropic profile
Etching proceeds at equal rates in all directions
Define anisotropic profile
Etching proceeds fast in 1 plane