Micro/Nano Fabrication Laboratory (MNFL)

Our 5,000-square-foot clean room is used by Princeton University students, faculty, staff, and other researchers to fabricate semiconductor, microfluidic, and MEMS devices. The laboratory consists of  class 1000 rooms for deposition and etch, a class 100 room for lithography, a separate electron beam lithography cleanroom, a lapping/polishing lab, and a packaging lab.

A special strength of the lab is the ability to handle a wide variety of substrates in our tools, from the usual III-V and silicon semiconductor substrates to the more unusual glass, metal, and plastic foils used in novel flexible electronics applications. Substrate sizes range from a few square mm InP to 150 mm diameter Si wafers.

The lab has a complete range of fabrication tools, including:

• Thin-film formation techniques, such as conventional and plasma-enhanced chemical vapor deposition, thermal and electron-beam evaporators, metal and dielectric sputterers, and high-temperature diffusion and oxidation.
• Pattern transfer by plasma etching, with 6 reactors dedicated to etching a wide range of materials including thin film dielectrics, GaAs, InP and related compounds, Si and SiGe.  The laboratory recently installed a Deep Si etch tool for MEMS and biofluidic device fabrication.
• Lithography with contact printers, a photomask generator, a nanoimprinter and an electron beam writer.