Fabrication Facility

IQC’s temporary fabrication (fab) facility is certified ISO 6 (Class 1,000) which implies that one cubic foot of air contains less than 1,000 particles of size 0.5um or larger.  In comparison, there are several million such particles in a cubic foot of non-filtered air. To achieve this level of cleanliness, the entire volume of air in the cleanroom is displaced and cleaned through HEPA (High Efficiency Particle Attenuation) filters once every 60 to 90 seconds. The facility has a total surface area of approximately 1,700 sq.ft., 1,000 of which is cleanroom space.

The fab is equipped with several key pieces of semiconductor fabrication equipment which are crucial for the building of nano-scale devices. These systems are routinely used to manufacture devices such as computer processor chips and MEMS inertial sensors which, for instance, are used in the deployment of automotive air bags. At IQC, these same technologies are used to build unique, custom devices needed by our researchers to further their numerous research initiatives. Via the use of our electron-beam lithography system, very elaborate devices can be made with dimensions as small as 20 billionths of a metre across.

Roughly one quarter of the funded fabrication equipment is currently housed in this temporary facility. All of the equipment will be fully functional by late fall 2010 and will be moved to the Mike & Ophelia Lazaridis Quantum Nano Centre starting in 2012. The remaining equipment will be installed directly in the Quantum Nano Centre soon after the building’s completion which is currently scheduled for mid-2011.

Some of the IQC cleanroom’s key pieces of equipment include:

• E-beam lithography system for patterning very fine features (down to 20nm) over very large areas
  
• Front/Back mask aligner for aligning and patterning features on both sides of a substrate
• PECVD & ALD cluster deposition system for precisely controlled deposition of thin films ranging from a few atoms to a few micrometers thick (Dec. 2010)
• E-beam evaporation system for deposition of films such as aluminum, titanium, gold and sapphire
• ICP chlorine RIE etch system for high-precision and selective removal of materials such as aluminum, titanium and semiconductors such as gallium arsenide and indium phosphide (Dec. 2010)
• ICP fluorine RIE etch system for high-precision and selective removal of silicon which is the most widely used semiconductor material in the electronics industry. For example, the processor chip in your laptop uses silicon as the starting material for the circuitry built on its top surface (Dec. 2010)
• Test equipment including film thickness measurement systems, a profilometer for measuring step heights on patterned substrates, microscopes and an electrical probe station

The shared IQC/WIN Fabrication Facility in the Mike & Ophelia Lazaridis Quantum Nano Centre (QNC) will have cleanrooms with two cleanliness levels: ISO 6 (Class 1,000) and ISO 5 (Class 100). The fab will have a total area of approximately 10,000 square feet.

The QNC fab will include additional equipment such as diffusion and oxidation furnaces, LPCVD furnaces (for depositing materials like silicon carbide which is used for making high-temperature sensors) and a projection stepper (needed to build multi-layer, complex devices). The facility will also feature a state-of-the-art magnetics multi-chamber UHV sputter deposition system — the first of its kind at any university in Canada.