MATERIALS
51
Making diamond affordable:
From the lab to the foundry
All new technologies must make the quantum leap
from working on the lab bench to working on the
production floor. Through government assistance
and continued press regarding “A Dawn for the semiconductor industry. In
Carbon Electronics” [Amaratunga], major pushes the past three years, thin film diamond
have been made to move polycrystalline diamond products, such as UNCD, has refined the
deposition to a production level process that meets processing of diamond to become completely
the levels of reliability and reproducibility foundry integratable. Specifications in thickness
demanded by the semiconductor industry. At uniformity across a wafer have been established
Advanced Diamond Technologies (ADT), this has and met. Requirements for chemicals, handling
meant new designs and materials for the source and particle introduction have been met. When the
reactors, implementing quality control and need is sufficient, thin film diamond is poised and
metrology tools into the process, and creating ready to enter mainstream production of
exacting standard for thickness, property semiconductor devices. ADT currently offers
uniformity, wafer bow and particle counts suitable products enabling the semiconductor industry to
for direct insertion into a MEMS foundry process leverage and integrate the advantages of diamond,
sequence. including DoSi (diamond on silicon) and DOI
Over the past few years ADT has extended the (diamond on insulator (oxide)) wafers, in wafer
original work at Argonne so that a number of sizes up to 200 mm. The thin film diamond Fig 2: NaDiaProbe
different varieties of diamond can be grown on thickness and properties can be varied in order to AFM probe wafer
wafers up to 200 mm in size with thickness and
property uniformity meeting or exceeding
industrial standards. These films are referred to by
the industrial brand name UNCD, motivated by
the original material developed at ANL. In
addition, recently developed low temperature
deposition techniques enable UNCD to be CMOS
compatible, enabling the integration of UNCD
MEMS devices with CMOS controller electronics
[Auciello]. Additionally, common semiconductor
processing techniques of photo lithography and
dry-etching developed for the integrated circuits
industry are the same processes used to pattern
and mould the polycrystalline diamond film. ADT
has developed a full set of “design rules” to allow
for the integration of UNCD into just about any
MEMS/CMOS process flow. Figure 2 shows a
NaDiaProbe AFM probe wafer near the end of the
fabrication process.
Making diamond available:
Reliable supply inside foundries
Essential to integration is diamond’s ability to
‘play nicely’ with the current processing steps of
December 2008 / January 2009 www.euroasiasemiconductor.com
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