New capabilities at MCN
Furnace
To compliment the high temperature furnace facility available at MCN, a four-stack horizontal furnace will soon be available in the class 10,000 cleanroom. This new furnace will allow batch processing of up to 150mm wafers and will provide access to high temperature processing (>1000 degrees Celsius) of silicon and other substrates. The system features a HEPA controlled loading station as well as four individual processing tubes to cater for dopant diffusion, annealing and the low-pressure chemical vapour deposition of silicon nitride.
Automated wetbench suite
The soon-to-be-commissioned automated wetbench suite is comprised of three custom made instruments - a manual wet processing deck, a semi-automated chemical cleaning station and an aerosol vapour dryer.
The manual wet processing deck is equipped with five chemical baths for small batch processing of substrates up to 6 inches in diameter. The tool is configured specifically for silicon wet etching and targeted metal removal.
The semi-automated chemical cleaning station is enclosed, exhausted and tailored to applications where process control, repeatability, throughput and safety are required. This tool will perform hazardous substrate cleaning tasks using a rotary robot to access wet chemical processing baths for silicon dioxide etching, removing contaminants and controlled rinsing. An accessory to this, the ultrasonic acetone de-scum station, will also be available for the bulk removal of photoresists and high performance photolithography lift-off for submicron lithographic features.
The vapour dryer creates an alcohol vapour above the substrate surface, creating the differential surface tension for drying without any need for heaters or rotation. The system is well-suited to drying applications using planar substrates.
Nanobuilder software
The FEI Helios NanoLab 600 Dual Beam FIB-SEM, one of MCN’s most utilized instruments, has been updated with new Nanobuilder software. A 3D nano-prototyping application, it allows users to design and create complex multi-layer nanostructures which are currently not possible or too time intensive to undertake. It offers high-resolution large-scale patterning and precision ion beam control.
Users are able to assign different processes to individual layers of the design and define the sequence in which the Nanobuilder executes these.The software includes automated beam alignment and drift control, to ensure that the layers are aligned with high accuracy to mitigate the chance of unwanted exposure of the pattern area to ions or electrons. This software is unique to MCN within Australia.
