Hello Noah!
On 1/12/20 9:08 PM, Wickel, Noah wrote:
Hello everyone, i am Noah, M.Sc. in EE / Nanoelectronics from RWTH Aachen University. would be very interested participating in building a stepper scanner. What is your idea for tackling the problem? It would be helpful to understand what kind of expertise is needed in the team
Well, how familiar you are with the silicon chip manufacturing process?
For our 1 um process we should be able to bring well-shaped structures at least in this size and with good accuracy on the photo resist.
The wavelength of light is between 750 nm (red) and 380 nm (violett).
Older machines on the market are in the 650 down to 500 nm resolution range (as we used at HKUST).
But for smaller structures, we need better resolutions. Mostly newer machines using diffraction (and multi-pattering) therefor.
So I guess, the knowledge someone needs here is a mixture of - photolithography (how this is done on the wafers) - physics of Light - optics for scaling down bigger structures in the mask down to the small structures we need on the resist - mechanical (and systems) engineering - electronics (for controlling the machine)
Our issue here is the following: in HKUST we had a stepper which was feasible. But now looking around to get into other clean rooms, we often see that there are *no* steppers. This also means, that a good photolithography for small clean rooms on Universities is not so quite common as expected.
We could buy and install one in the clean room we like to go into (assuming we had a budget for that). But other folks which like to use our LibreSilicon process in their clean room probably facing the same problem. Hence, finding a solution which closes this gap for others too would be nice.
Okay, this sounds a little bit scaring, I know. But probably you can set your footprint into that field and get your job offer from a equipment supplier if you like.
Regards, Hagen