Nanofabrication Clean Room Facility

The recently-renovated and expanded CNI Nanofabrication Clean Room occupies approximately 5,000 square feet of space. It is built to be class 10,000 to class 1,000 but effectively measurements show that it is cleaner. The clean room is divided into 7 separate bays, each dedicated to a set of related fabrication processes:

• Photolithography bay: includes dedicated fume hoods and photoresist spin-coaters, two mask aligners (one for DUV applications), two mask fabrication systems: a manual laser writing (3µm resolution) and an automatic laser writing system with sub-micron resolution, two plasma ashers (oxygen, argon, CF4) for substrate preparation and stock photo/e-beam resists (list of supplied resists can be found here: Supplied Resists List).

• Wet chemical bay with an automatic RCA-clean bench, spin-rinse dryer for 4" wafers, general acid hood and general base hood for various wet-etch, clean and patterning processes.

• E-beam lithography capability with Elionix Boden 50f and Nabity Pattern Generation System (NPGS).

• Plasma bay with Reactive Ion Etching (RIE) plasma processing based on chlorine and fluorine chemistries, as well as Deep RIE for high aspect ratio and selectivity etching, and PECVD for silicon oxide, silicon nitride, and amorphous silicon deposition.

• Deposition bay including two sputtering systems (dedicated to metals and dielectrics respectively) that also allow reactive sputtering, an e-beam evaporator, Ultra High Vacuum (UHV) e-beam evaporator, Atomic Layer Deposition (ALD), and a thermal evaporator (the three latter are located in the Plasma bay due to space considerations). The list of evaporation materials supplied by the clean room can be found here: Angstrom EvoVac Deposition System and Angstrom UHV E-BEAM Deposition System. The list of sputtering targets can be found here: AJA Orion 8 Dielectric Sputtering and AJA Orion 3 Metal Sputtering.

• Microscopy bay consisting of a FEI Nova NanoSEM 450 (with Nabity Pattern Generation System for e-beam writing), Nikon optical microscopes (with bright/dark field and differential interference contrast), optical profilometry and two Filmetrics thin film characterization systems.

• Back-end bay consisting of a Disco dicing saw, G&P chemical mechanical planarization (CMP) system, SCS Parylene coating system, Wire bonder, and a Baltec Critical Point Dryer.

Download the clean room brochure here: Clean Room Brochure.

Inventory items (wafers, wafer boxes, tweezers, notebooks, tool belts, etc.) are available to purchase from the clean room office for use in the lab. Prices are subjected to change by the actual cost of the inventory items. List can be found here: Inventory List.