Tools & Capabilities

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Tools & Equipment

Tegal 6540 Plasma Etch System: This system features the unique HRe-™ reactor with dual-frequency RF power technology and magnetic plasma confinement. An additional etch chamber will be added to this system in the future.
GCA 8000 i-line Step-and-Repeat Optical Lithography System: This versatile, user friendly optical stepper significantly enhances our ability to pattern substrates of varying sizes, shapes, and thicknesses, which is critical for our complex oxide focus area.
OAI DUV Flood Exposure System: This collimated DUV light source has been added for processing bi-layer resist stacks used for metal lift off for wafer sizes up to 200 mm.
Cambridge Savannah 200 Atomic Layer Deposition System: This system enables deposition of high aspect ratio thin conformal coatings with thickness uniformity of ±1% using as many as six different precursors in a single run.
AMAT 5000 PECVD System: A PECVD chamber was added to the existing Applied Materials cluster tool to address the site’s growing emphasis on thin film deposition of undoped, p-type, and n-type a-Si thin films (including highly conformal coating).
LEO 1530 Field Emission Scanning Electron Microscope (upgrade): The user interface, computer, EO board, and stage control board were upgraded. This provided enhancements including fish-eye imaging mode, stage navigation, and new noise reduction methods.
Kurt Lesker Lab 18 Evaporator: This custom designed thermal/electron beam evaporator with in situ substrate cleaning capability and load locked deposition chamber was purchased with support from the Penn State MRSEC. Installation is scheduled for Spring 2009.
Wyko NT1100 Optical Profiler (upgrade): A high power objective was added for rapid surface imaging over a 300 x 225 µm2 field with a lateral resolution of ~400 nm and a vertical resolution < 1 nm.
Kurt Lesker CMS-18 Sputter Tool: This custom designed sputtering tool was purchased with funding from the NSF NNIN Major Research Instrumentation program. The system includes two RF and two DC sources and a load locked chamber for in situ deposition of complex oxide and metal thin films. The 150 mm capable rotating stage can provide an RF bias of up to 100 W. Substrate heating is included with temperatures up to 800°C to optimize the deposition conditions to control film morphology and stress. The system is computer controlled and employs recipe driven processes. Ordered in 2008. installation is scheduled for Spring 2009.