Nanofabrication: Clean room facilities
Experimental Officer: Mark Heath
About our clean rooms
We have two clean rooms covering a total of 150m2. These house lithography, etching, dicing and deposition systems for nanofabrication.
The Savchenko Centre for Nanoscience is a purpose built semiconductor type cleanroom with advanced air-condition control of temperature and humidity throughout the working areas. Incoming air is filtered to provide ISO Class 5 and 6 working environments. An acid bench with an integrated DI water system and two solvent benches, all with their own Class 4 laminar air flow systems, are built into the facility to complement the fabrication process.
A second cleanroom is used as a dedicated optical lithography area housing a number of optical lithography and deposition systems.
Work with us
We have worked successfully with commercial and academic partners and are keen to continue with further projects and collaborations. If you would like more information on how you can use our facilities, please contact Mark Heath.
Clean room facilities
If you would like to use one of the facilities within our Clean Rooms, please contact Mark Heath directly: M.Heath@exeter.ac.uk to find out more.
Optics
NanoBeam NB4 Electron Beam System
A state-of-the-art 30kV to 100kV dedicated electron beam lithography tool capable of producing 10nm lines (±15%) across a 250um Field using a 2nA Beam.
Each of the fields can be accurately positioned and joined together using a 195mm x 195mm precision stage controlled by a 0.31nm (l/2048) laser interferometer system.
It has a 20bit, 55Mhz pattern generator with 1nm resolution (beam-step) at a 1mm field size.
The system is capable of directly writing on a variety of samples ranging from 5mm to 150mm square, including optical mask plates.
Durham Magneto Optics Microwriter ML Laser writer
Optical system capable of handling 200mm substrates and utilising three 405nm lasers with nominal beam widths of 0.6µm,1.0µm and 5.0µm. Maximum write speeds are of the order of 180mm²/ minute using the 5µm laser.
Karl Suss MJB4 Optical Mask Aligner
Wafer and substrate handling up to 100mm with soft, hard and vacuum contact exposure modes using up to 5" mask plates.
Kloe UV-Kub 2 masking optical system
Allows 365nm UV flood exposure of substrates up to 4” in size.
Deposition systems
Kurt J Lesker Evaporation System
A custom designed Combined Electron Beam and Sputtering Evaporation System with substrate RF or DC biasing and the capacity to oxidise samples during the deposition process. It has a 10kW Ebeam power supply which is capable of evaporating a wide range of materials. It has a 3" diameter sputtering target for enhanced deposition uniformity and automatic operation using a recipe driven computer control system.
HHV Auto306 Thermal Evaporator
A standard thermal evaporator with 4 sources generally set up for Cr/Au, Au and Al electrode deposition. Minimum base pressure 2x10-7 Torr.
Moorfield nanoPVD S10A
Benchtop sputtering system with 3x2" magnetron sources and ability to do RF or DC sputtering. Materials include dielectrics (SiO2, Al2O3) and metals (W, Ta, Ti).
Processing systems
JLS Designs RIE 80 Etching System
An automatic computer controlled RF and ICP Reactive Ion Etching system fitted with a Laser Etch Penetration Depth (EPD) monitoring system to accurately control etch depths. It has the facility to use six different process gases so is very versatile and can easily be adapted for future research work. Typical process gases are O2, Ar, CHF3 and SF6.
Moorfield Nano ETCH
A reactive ion etching system designed for but not limited to research into Graphene. The system has two process gases attached, namely Argon and Oxygen and is capable of plasma generation at very low powers making it ideal for etching thin films.
LoadPoint Micro Ace 3 Dicing Saw
Automated dicing system capable of cutting Silicon, Quartz and Sapphire substrates up to 6" diameter. Stage resolution down to 1 micron.
K&S 4123 and 4700 Wire Bonders
Manual wedge bonding utilising 25 micron gold and aluminium wire for electrical connections from sample to chip carrier.
Critical Point Drier
Uses liquid CO2 to dry delicate samples such as suspended graphene.
Metrology
Nikon LV150 Upright Microscopes
Scientific microscope complete with x5, x10, x20, x50 and x100 bright field objective lenses. Comes with a digital camera and Nikon imaging software.
KLA-Tencor D-100 Surface Profiler
Provides high resolution 2D profiling of surfaces, including step heights and surface roughness measuring. Can measure step heights up to 1.2 mm with sub-Angstrom resolution. Scan range up to 30mm and a manual x-y range of 140mm.
Probe Station
Moveable 4 point probes enable continuity measurements of electronic samples. Moveable microscope stage enables precision alignment. Can be connected to a source/measure meter or a lock-in amplifier.