MILITARY INSTITUTE OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

IPE- 425: Micromanufacturing (3 credit hours)

Dr. Md Mahfuzur Rahman

Assistant Professor, Dept. of IPE
18th Feb, 2019
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Intended Learning Outcomes

ILO 1: Design fabrication process of a microstructure

ILO 2: Identify and describe commonly used materials for
Microelectro-mechanical Systems

ILO 3: Describe the properties of Silicon, SiO2

ILO 4: Describe the fabrication methods of Silicon

ILO 5: Describe the methods for thin film deposition

ILO 6: CT-1

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Introduction

Conventional Lithography

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Introduction

Use of a sacrificial photoresist spacer to form an electroplated air bridge:

Gold
Air

Si Substrate

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 Introduction

Positive and negative resist: exposure, development, and pattern transfer. (a) Negative
resists remain in the exposed region. (b) Positive resists develop in the exposed region.

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Introduction

How do you fabricate the following structure:

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MEMS Materials
MEMS consists of microfabricated mechanical and electrical structures working in
concert for perception and control of the local environment.

The fabrication of MEMS structures often depends on

• Use of structural, sacrificial, and masking materials on a common substrate
• Issues related to etch selectivity, adhesion, microstructure, and others
Commonly used materials are:
• Single-Crystal Silicon
• Polysilicon
• Silicon Dioxide
• Silicon Nitride
• Germanium-Based Materials
• Metals
• Silicon Carbide
• Diamond
• III–V Materials
• Piezoelectric Materials
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MEMS Materials
Single-Crystal Silicon:

Use of silicon (Si) as a material for microfabricated sensors can be traced to 1954, [Smith,
1954].
The conjoining of Si IC processing with Si micromachining techniques during the 1980s
marked the advent of MEMS and positioned Si as the primary material for MEMS.

Single-crystal Si has a diamond (cubic) crystal structure. It has an electronic band gap of 1.1
eV, and like many semiconducting materials, it can be doped with impurities to alter its
conductivity.

Phosphorus (P) is a common dopant for n-type Si and boron (B) is commonly used to
produce p-type Si.
Mechanically, Si is a brittle material with a Young’s modulus of about 190 GPa, a value that
is comparable to steel (210 GPa).

Being among the most abundant elements on earth, Si can be refined readily from sand to
produce electronic-grade material.
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MEMS Materials
Polysilicon:
• Polysilicon is made up of small single-crystal domains called grains,whose orientations and/or alignment vary
with respect to each other. The roughness often observed on polysilicon surfaces is due to the granular
nature of polysilicon.

• the most common material system as the primary structural material, SiO2 as the sacrificial, and Si3N4 for
electrical isolation of device structures.

• it has mechanical properties comparable to single-crystal Si, because the required processing technology has
been developed for IC applications, and because it is resistant to SiO2 etchants.

• Deposition method: low-pressure chemical vapor deposition (LPCVD)

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MEMS Materials

Silicon Dioxide:

• In polysilicon surface micromachining, SiO2 is used as a sacrificial material, as it can be dissolved easily using
etchants that do not attack polysilicon.

• In a less prominent role, SiO2 is used as an etch mask for dry etching of thick polysilicon films because it is
chemically resistant to dry polysilicon etch chemistries.

• The SiO2 growth and deposition processes: Thermal oxidation and LPCVD, plasma-enhanced chemical
vapor deposition (PECVD).

Silicon Nitride:

• Si3N4 is widely used in MEMS for electrical isolation, surface passivation, and etch masking and as a
mechanical material.

• Deposition methods for Si3N4 thin films: LPCVD and PECVD.

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MEMS Materials

Metals:

Metals are used in many different capacities ranging from hard etch masks and thin film conducting
interconnects to structural elements in microsensors and microactuators.

Deposition techniques: evaporation, sputtering, CVD, and electroplating.

In MEMS, Al thin films can be used in conjunction with polymers such as polyimide because the films can be
sputterdeposited at low temperatures.
In most cases, Al is used as a structural layer; however, Al can be used as a sacrificial layer as well.

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MEMS Materials
Silicon Carbide:
✔ The use of Si at high temperature is prohibited by its electrical, mechanical, and chemical properties. These
would include high-temperature, high-radiation, high-wear, and highly acidic and basic chemical
environments.
✔ To be a direct replacement for Si in such applications, the material would have to be a chemically inert,
extremely hard, temperature-insensitive, micromachinable semiconductor.
✔ A class of wide bandgap semiconductors that includes silicon carbide (SiC) and diamond embodies the
electrical, mechanical, and chemical properties required for many harsh environment applications, but the
necessary micromachining processes did not exist.

Properties:
SiC is polymorphic, meaning that it exists in multiple crystalline structures.
SiC exists in three main polytypes: cubic, hexagonal, and rhombehedral.
SiC in general has a high thermal conductivity, ranging from 3.2 to 4.9 W/cm-K, and a high breakdown field
(30 105V/cm).
SiC films can be doped to create n- and p-type material.
The stiffness of SiC is quite large relative to Si; with measured Young’s modulus values in the range of 300 to
700 Gpa.
SiC is not etched in any wet chemistries commonly used in Si micromachining.
SiC can be etched in strong bases like KOH, but only at temperatures in excess of 600°C. SiC does not melt but
rather sublimes at temperatures in excess of 1800°C.
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MEMS Materials
Diamond:

❖ It is commonly known as nature’s hardest material, an ideal property for high-wear environments.
Diamond has a very large electronic bandgap (5.5 eV) that is well suited for stable high-temperature
operation.

❖ Diamond has a very high Young’s modulus (1035GPa), making it the ideal material for high-frequency
micromachined resonators.

❖ Perhaps diamond’s only disadvantage from a materials properties perspective is that a stable oxide
cannot be grown on its surface.

❖ Unlike SiC, fabrication of diamond MEMS structures is restricted to polycrystalline and amorphous
material.

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MEMS Materials
III–V Materials:

Galium arsenide (GaAs), indium phosphide (InP), and other III–V compounds are attractive electronic
materials for various types of sensors and optoelectronic devices.

III–V compounds have favorable piezoelectric and optoelectric properties, high piezoresistive constants,
and wide electronic bandgaps (relative to Si).

Piezoelectric Materials:

Mechanical stress polarizes the material, which results in the production of an electric field.

The effect also works in reverse; that is, an applied electric field acts to produce a mechanical
strain. Many materials retain some sort of piezoelectric behavior, such as quartz, GaAs, and
ZnO, to name a few.

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Silicon Crystal Growth

Purification of Silicon
Silica sand, SiO2, is reduced by carbon, yielding 98% pure silicon according to the reaction

This material is known as metallurgical grade silicon (MGS). MGS is converted to gaseous
trichlorosilane SiHCl3 (boiling point 31.8◦C) according to the reaction

The main impurities in MGS (Fe, B, P) react to form FeCl3, BCl3 and PCl3/PCl5. Trichlorosilane gas
is purified by distillation, during which FeCl3,and PCl3/PCl5 are removed as high boiling point
contaminations and BCl3 as low boiling point contamination, and converted back to solid silicon by
the decomposition of SiHCl3 on hot silicon rods by the reaction

This material is of extremely high purity, and is known as electronic grade silicon (EGS). EGS is a
polycrystalline material, which is used as a source material in single-crystal growth.
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Czochralski crystal growth (CZ)

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Czochralski crystal growth (CZ)

In CZ-growth, a silica crucible (SiO2) is filled with

undoped electronic grade polysilicon. The dopant is
introduced by adding pieces of doped silicon (for
low doping concentration) or elemental dopants P,
B, Sb or As (for high doping concentration). The
crucible is heated in vacuum to ca. 1420◦C to melt
the silicon.

A single-crystalline seed of known crystal

orientation is dipped into the silicon melt. The
silicon solidifies into a crystal structure determined
by the seed crystal. A thin neck is quickly drawn to
suppress the defects that develop because of a large
temperature difference between the seed and the
melt, and then the pulling rate is lowered. Both the
ingot and the crucible are rotated (in opposite
directions); ingot rotation is ca. 20 rpm and crucible
rotation about 10 rpm.

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Float zone (FZ) crystal growth

✔ If high purity or oxygen-free silicon is needed, float zone (FZ) crystal growth
is used.

✔ In the FZ-method, a polysilicon ingot is placed on top of a single-crystal seed.

✔ The polycrystalline ingot is heated externally by an RF coil, which locally

melts the ingot.

✔ The coil and the melted zone move upwards, and a single crystal solidifies on
top of the seed crystal.

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Thin-film Materials and Processes

Commonly used Deposition processes:

PHYSICAL VAPOUR DEPOSITION (PVD): Metallic film deposition

EVAPORATION AND MOLECULAR BEAM EPITAXY

SPUTTERING

CHEMICAL VAPOUR DEPOSITION (CVD)

PLASMA ENHANCED CHEMICAL VAPOR DEPOSITION (PECVD)

ELECTROLESS DEPOSITION

SPIN COATING: resist spinning, spin-on-glasses, Thermally stable

Polymers

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Sample Questions: CT-1

Solve the problem:

Density of Silicon = 2.3 g/cm3

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Exercises

Design a process to fabricate a DNA microarray pixel shown below.

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