Central Facility for Microelectronics

This facility, housed in a class-100/1000 cleanroom, supports a reasonably complete range of microelectronic processing capabilities. It is run on a user-fee basis, with access to all Brown faculty and outside users, with a couple of local high-tech start-up companies typically maintaining access privileges (requiring insurance and appropriate safety training) with established user fees. In 2009-2010, the facility supported over 100 users from 25 research groups. The facility has a full-time research engineer (Michael Jibitsky) to maintain and upgrade its equipment and train new users, and a faculty director (Rashid Zia).

Current capabilities include:

• -optical lithography down to ~1 μm minimum feature size (Karl Suss 4" mask aligner);
• -optical low-resolution lithography system from Oriel Instruments, capable of using transparency masks and handling large (up to 5")
• -substrates;
• -reactive ion etching in chlorine and fluorine chemistries (Trion and Plasmatherm tools);
• -plasma-enhanced CVD of oxides and nitrides (Plasmatherm 790);
• -ion-beam assisted deposition of dielectric films, including high-reflectivity multilayer dielectric mirrors (Oxford Instruments);
• -wet processing;
• -low-pressure CVD and thermal oxidation furnaces;
• -electron-beam evaporation metallization (Temescal CV-14 and Lesker Lab 18);
• -RF magnetron sputtering (Lab 18); -rapid thermal annealing; -surface profilometry and ellipsometry.