In a good number of occasions, the process for obtaining a layer under study conveniently patterned, isolated, ready to be transferred, or to be contacted needs of ancillary materials that, despite not being the object of the scientific interest, are of crucial importance as they not only make possible the preparation and obtention of the main layers, but also can condition some of their basic properties.
This set of techniques contains the required suite of deposition processes for such ancillary materials. Those processes include Low Pressure Chemical Vapor Deposition (LPCVD) and Plasma Enhanced Chemical Vapor Deposition (PECVD) of thin films such as silicon nitride, silicon oxide, polysilicon that can be used as etching masks, implantation and diffusion barriers, dielectric barriers, spacers or conductive layers. Also thin metal layers deposited by evaporation or sputtering are available.
RIE is used to etch various materials under vacuum in the presence of reactive ions. The sample to be etched is placed in a vacuum chamber and gas is injected into the process chamber via a gas inlet in the top electrode. The lower electrode is negatively biased and a single RF plasma source determines both the ion density and their energy.
A set of classical microelectronic processes for pattern transfer through etching of thin films than are co-adjuvant to the functional materials of a given sytem under study in the micro or nano domain. It includes wet and dry etching of all those ancillary dielecric or conducting materials.
Soft Lithography has been successfully used to transfer well-defined micro sized patterns from rigid materials to surfaces of soft materials and biomaterials eg natural or synthetic polymers, allowing the replication of high fidelity microenvironments at low cost and with great repeatability.
Ultraviolet lithography also known as optical or photolithography is the most commonly used patterning technique in microfabrication. A photosensitive material (photoresist) is spin-coated onto the substrate to be patterned. The photoresist is illuminated with UV light through a photomask which contains the relevant geometric patterns.
We provide modular experimental stations to study the evolution of electric and magnetic dipole orders, and their degree of coupling, which is an identifying feature of novel magneto-electric systems. Features for designing multifunctional devices, such as magneto-electric sensors or high-capacity four-state logic memories, can be assessed.
