First attempts at SepCon on 6-inch wafers
SiMPore has been collaborating with the Infotonics Center to scale our SepCon production to a 6-inch wafer. The wafers are patterned and deposited at their facility and then brought back to UR where we anneal and etch. This week, we etched several wafers and the initial results look promising. The big news is that we can form pores in material that is deposited out-of-house. Here’s a TEM of a 15 nm film that was annealed at 1050 C for 60 s.
ITC uses a pulsed DC power supply to deposit the silicon, not a RF magnetron source like we have in the AJA tool. Both films are sputtered (PVD), however. Recall that we had trouble forming pores in CVD films.
Once some of the kinks are worked out in the etch process, we should be in good shape to move to the 6-inch platform for all our production needs.
A 6-inch wafer can accommodate almost 430 SepCons whereas the 4-inch wafer only holds about 140!