Scalable Tent Transfer Laser Manufacturing
The NPN tenting mechanism I’ve described in a few different posts has relied solely on mechanical technique. I poke the substrate with tweezers, or delaminate it with high electrical forces, or heat it up and let it contract while in contact with each other. It would scale very poorly if we tried to make this manufacturing technique work across an entire wafer. The goal of manufacturing the tent is to bring both surfaces into close contact, and delaminate the membrane. We have some preliminary evidence that we can actually delaminate the membrane very precisely. I gathered it a year or two ago in Nottingham with Kevin.
LASER MELT!
If the tenting mechanism proves to be useful, we should be able to scale up manufacturing using a laser scribe tool. It’s a dicing saw with lasers! Unfortunately, it’s a tool in the semiconductor industry, so that usually means it’s expensive to get.
http://www.synova.ch/machines/lds-laser-dicing-machines/
I might be able to create my own using my new imaginary best friend, a magnifying glass, and a micromanipulator stage (3d printed pieces to join them appropriately). Or maybe we can modify one of the other microscopes to accept a point source in this wavelength regime. The thinness of the membrane works in our favor for this kind of manufacturing (low volume of material to be removed = low power). A dicing saw would tear, whereas the melting of the membrane in these areas will be much more uniform.
A proper tool has programmable beam paths, so eventually, we could even optimize the delamination process based on which edge is removed and and at what rates they are removed.
http://youtu.be/rjkvdxGaD4A
Again, this is in the future, where everyone is requesting nanoporous tents for their devices. Ideally, we could put wafer to wafer in contact and then use the machine to transfer the membrane, and then dice up individual devices. If we are even cleverer, we could potentially use the tool as a water vapor primer to wet the individual tents on the inside (each dicing tool has a rinse feature to ensure clean packaging).
I should trademark “Laser Chip Sauna” now.