Grant: Research Tools and Instruments - Category 1 (<$150,000)

Designing miniaturized structures and devices with a high degree of reproducibility and quality is made possible through Micro and Nano-fabrication technologies. These technologies play important roles in the conception of devices such as sensors, functional surfaces or photonic devices. One procedure crucial to any fabrication at such small scales is the etching process, which is done with a Reactive Ion Etcher (RIE). This apparatus creates ionic species by applying a radio frequency electromagnetic field of a few hundred Watts in a low vacuum environment. The generated ions, i.e. the plasma, are accelerated to collide with the surface to be etched. Surfaces are typically silicon wafers that either need to be thoroughly cleaned prior to further fabrication or need to be etched in a specific pattern. Examples includes the cleaning of wafers (Silicon, fused silica or other inorganic surfaces) to eliminate any organic contaminants to improve surface bonding efficiency and reactivity for further treatments, cleaning of residual photoresists that can be present on the surface of the wafer and may be detrimental to the device conception. In such cleaning processes, molecular oxygen (O2) is used as the main etching gas. Etching can also include the precise reduction in size of the features fabricated onto a surface of the wafer. Due to the anisotropic nature of the etching process, it can be used to sharpen features such as side-walls of a feature located on the surface of interest or organic nanoparticles deposited onto a surface. Importantly, silicon oxide and silicon nitrides layers can be etched by an RIE using gases such as CF4 of CHF3. In such cases, a portion of the surface of the wafer is protected by a photoresist while the unprotected part will undergo etching by the plasma, revealing a patterned surface after removal of the protective photoresist. This technology allows to conceive and fabricate a collection of micro- and nano-features over the surface of a single 4 inch wafer, the standard of our facility. A reactive ion etcher is therefore essential to the success of any advanced fabrication procedure at the nanoscale. A RIE with sufficient flexibility to be used by most of the Western Nanofabrication Facility trainee is therefore needed.