Optical devices based on planar lightwave circuit (PLC) technology have the advantages of small size, high reliability, possibility for large scale production, and potential integration with electronics. These devices are widely employed in optical telecommunications, sensing, data storage, imaging, and signal processing. This thesis focuses on some selected PLC based devices, such as power splitters, demultiplexers, triplexers and polarization beam splitters. First, the basic principle of the waveguides and the simulation methods for PLC devices are discussed. A novel effective index method is introduced to reduce a two-dimensional structure to a one-dimensional one, and can be implemented for arbitrarily shaped waveguides. Numerical methods, such as finite-difference mode solver, beam propagation method, finite-difference time-domain method are introduced to analysis the mode profile of the waveguides, and the propagation properties of light in PLC devices. Multimode interference (MMI) couplers are widely used in many PLCs, such as power splitters, ring lasers, optical switches, and wavelength division multiplexers/demultiplexers. In this work, concepts for improving the self-imaging quality of MMI couplers are analyzed and new designs are proposed. A significant improvement in performance together with compact sizes were obtained with taper sections at the input/output of MMI couplers based on SOI, and deeply etched ridges in MMI couplers based on SiO2. A polarization insensitive dual wavelength demultiplexer based on sandwiched MMI waveguides was presented. Novel devices including triplexers and polarization beam splitters were realized by using photonic crystal (PhC) structures. Two stages of directional couplers based on PhC waveguides are cascaded to form an ultracompact triplexer. The special decoupling property of the PhC waveguide based directional coupler was utilized in the design. A novel polarization beam splitter was realized by combining a MMI coupler and a PhC which works as a polarization sensitive reflector. Finally, fabrication and optical characterization of an ultra-compact directional coupler and PhC structures in InP are presented. In a single etching step, by using the lag-effect in inductively coupled plasma reactive ion etching, a compact directional coupler (55 μm) is demonstrated. Carrier life times in PhC structures etched by chemically assisted ion beam etching were investigated, for emitter and switching applications. / QC 20100909

Silicium wird während des Ätzvorgangs von Solar-Wafern mit HF-HNO3-Mischungen hauptsächlich zu Hexafluorosilicat (SiF62-) umgewandelt, welches sich negativ auf den Ätzabtrag, die Reaktivität der Ätzlösung und die Oberflächeneigenschaften der Wafer auswirkt. Möglichkeiten, das Silicium als SiF62- abzutrennen, sollten in dieser Arbeit untersucht werden. Voraussetzung für Abtrennungsuntersuchungen war eine quantitative Bestimmung des SiF62- in Ätzlösungen mittels Ramanspektrometrie. Als Abreicherungs-möglichkeiten des Siliciums in Form von Hexafluorosilicat wurden einerseits das Ausfrieren als Hydrat der Hexafluorokieselsäure (H2SiF6•nH2O) und andererseits die Fällung als K2SiF6 untersucht. Die experimentellen Ergebnisse wurden jeweils gestützt durch thermodynamische Modellierungen: die Tieftemperaturphasendiagramme wurden durch eine modifizierte BET-Modellierung bestätigt, die Löslichkeiten durch Nutzung des SIT-Ansatzes. Demnach erwies sich die Ausfällung als K2SiF6 als ökonomisch günstigste Variante.

Current board technologies are inherently performance-limited (FR-4) or cost-prohibitive (Al2O3/AlN). Next-generation high-density packaging applications would necessitate a new base substrate material to achieve ultra-fine pitch solder-joint reliability and multiple layers of fine-line wiring at low cost. The NEMI 2000 roadmap defines the need for 4-8 layers of 5-10 m wiring for future system boards. The 2003 ITRS roadmap calls for organic substrates with less than 100-m area-array pitch in the package or board by year 2010. Solder-joint reliability at such fine-pitch is a matter of concern for the industry. Use of underfills reduces thermal stresses but increases cost and, in addition, their dispensing becomes increasingly more complicated with the shorter gaps required for future interconnects. Therefore, there is a pronounced need to evaluate board materials with CTE close to that of Si for reliable flip-chip on board without underfill. Recently, a novel manufacturing process (using polymeric precursor) has been demonstrated to yield boards that have the advantages of organic boards in terms of large-area processability and machinability at potentially low-cost while retaining the high stiffness (~250 GPa) and Si-matched CTE (~2.5 ppm/㩠of ceramics. This work reports the evaluation of novel SiC-based ceramic composite board material for ultra-fine pitch solder-joint reliability without underfill and multilayer support. FE models were generated to model the behavior of flip-chips assembled without underfill and subjected to accelerated thermal cycling. These models were used to calculate solder-joint strains which have a strong direct influence on fatigue life of the solder. Multilayer structures were also simulated for thermal shock testing so as to assess via strains for microvia reliability. Via-pad misregistration was derived from the models and compared for different boards. Experiments were done to assemble flip-chips on boards without underfill followed by thermal shock testing so as to get the number of cycles to failure. To assess microvia reliability, 2 layer structures containing vias of different diameters were fabricated and subjected to thermal cycling. Via-pad misalignment was also studied experimentally. Modeling and experimental results were corroborated so as to evaluate thermomechanical suitability of C-SiC for high-density packaging requirements.

Photonic crystals, periodic dielectric structures that control photons in a similar way that atomic crystals control electrons, present opportunities for the unprecedented control of light. Photonic crystals display a wide gamut of properties, such as the photonic band gap, negative index of refraction, slow or stationary modes, and anomalous refraction and propagation effects. This thesis investigates the modeling, simulation, fabrication, and measurement of two-dimensional square lattice photonic crystals. An effective index model was developed to describe the propagation of electromagnetic waves in the media and applied to characterize the behavior of self-collimated beams to discern the effect of the photonic crystal on the evolution of the amplitude and phase of the propagating beam. Potential applications include optical interconnects and stand alone devices such as filters and lasers. Based on design parameters from the simulations, two dimensional photonic crystals were fabricated on amorphous and single crystal silicon-on-insulator substrates utilizing electron beam lithography and inductively coupled plasma etching. A unique etching process utilizing a combination of Cl2 and C4F6 gases was developed and characterized which displayed a vertical profile with a sidewall angle of under 1 degree from vertical and very smooth sidewalls for features as small as 150 nm. The high quality of the etching was the key to obtaining extremely low loss, low noise structures, making feasible the fabrication of large area photonic crystal devices that are necessary to measure propagation phenomena. Reflectivity measurements were used to directly observe the photonic band structure with excellent correlation with theory. A device was designed and fabricated which successfully verified the prediction of the simulations through measurements of the self-collimation effect across a broad range of infrared wavelengths. A solid foundation for the necessary components (simulation, modeling, design, fabrication, and measurement) of two-dimensional photonic crystal has been demonstrated. Elements from solid state physics, materials science, optics, and electromagnetics were incorporated to further the understanding of the mechanism of beam propagation in photonic crystals and illuminating the vast potential of research in periodic media.

As feature sizes in semiconductor devices become smaller and newer materials are incorporated, current methods for photoresist and post plasma etch residue removal face several challenges. A cleaning process should be environmentally benign, compatible with dielectric materials and copper, and provide residue removal from narrow and high aspect ratio features. In this work, sub-critical CO2 based mixtures have been developed to remove the etch residues; these mixtures satisfy the above requirements and can potentially replace the two step residue removal process currently used in the integrated circuit (IC) industry. Based on the chemical nature of the residue being removed, additives or co-solvents to CO2 have been identified that can remove the residues without damaging the dielectric layers. Using the phase behavior of these additives as a guide, the composition of the co-solvent was altered to achieve a single liquid phase at moderate pressures without compromising cleaning ability. The extent of residue removal has been analyzed primarily by x-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) and scanning electron microscopy (SEM). Various techniques such as attenuated total reflection - Fourier transform infrared (ATR-FTIR) spectroscopy, angle-resolved XPS (ARXPS), and interferometry were used to probe the interaction of cleaning fluids with residues. Model films of photoresists and plasma deposited residues were used to assist in understanding the mechanism of residue removal. From these studies, it was concluded that residue removal takes place primarily by attack of the interface between the residue and the substrate; a solvent rinse then lifts these residues from the wafer. It has been shown that transport of the additives to the interface is enhanced in the presence of CO2. From positronium annihilation lifetime spectroscopy (PALS) studies on a porous dielectric film, it has been shown that these high pressure fluids do not cause significant changes to the pore sizes or the bonding structure of the film. Hence, this method can be used to remove post etch residues from low-k dielectric films.

Festkörperspurdetektoren (FKSD) auf der Basis von Polymermaterialien sind ein geeignetes Mittel zum Nachweis von Ionenstrahlung [1]. Ebenso können damit Neutronen über ihre sekundären Ionen gemessen werden. Als passive und integrierende Detektoren eignen sie sich insbesondere gut für die Dosimetrie, wobei die geringe bzw. fehlende Empfindlichkeit für Elektronen und Photonenstrahlung ein weiteres Argument für die Anwendungen in gemischten Strahlungsfeldern darstellt. Als passive Detektoren arbeiten FKSD ohne zusätzliche Messelektronik und Stromversorgung. Das macht sie insbesondere für die Personen- und Ortsdosimetrie interessant. Allerdings sind die latenten, submikroskopischen Ionenspuren nach der Exposition nicht unmittelbar sichtbar. Erst durch einen mehr oder weniger aufwendigen Ätzprozess werden diese lichtmikroskopisch oder für das Auge direkt sichtbar. Da bei FKSD von der Herstellung bis zur Ätzung alle Ereignisse registriert werden, handelt es sich somit auch um integrierende Detektoren.Für die Dosimetrie ist insbesondere der Nachweis von leichten Ionen bis zu spezifischen Energien von 10 MeV / Nukleon wichtig. Protonenstrahlung wird für die Radiotherapie von Geschwulstkrankheiten angewendet; die meisten leichten Ionen der Elemente Wasserstoff bis Sauerstoff sind Bestandteile der Sekundärstrahlung von Neutronen,[Alpha]-Teilchen treten häufig als Zerfallsprodukt verschiedener schwerer Radioisotope auf. Während eine große Zahl von Polymeren eine Empfindlichkeit für schwere Ionen zeigen, ist die Auswahl für leichte Ionen schon sehr eingeschränkt.[Alpha]-Teilchen können noch mit verschiedenen Polykarbonaten, Zelluloseacetat und -nitrat nachgewiesen werden. Die Registrierung von Protonen ist derzeit nur mit dem besonderen Polykarbonat CR - 39 und mit Zellulose (di/tri) nitrat möglich. Natürlich eignen sich diese Materialien auch hervorragend zur Messung von [Alpha] -Teilchen. Leichte Ionen stellen weiterhin eine wichtige Sonde in der Radiobiologie dar. Festkörperspurdetektoren können hier als Monitore für die getroffenen Zellen und Zellbestandteile dienen. Dadurch ist prinzipiell eine genaue Lokalisierung der getroffenen Zellbausteine/Organellen möglich...

<p>Semiconductor wafer bonding has been a subject of interestfor many years and a wide variety of wafer bonding techniqueshave been reported in literature. In adhesive wafer bondingorganic and inorganic adhesives are used as intermediatebonding material. The main advantages of adhesive wafer bondingare the relatively low bonding temperatures, the lack of needfor an electric voltage or current, the compatibility withstandard CMOS wafers and the ability to join practically anykind of wafer materials. Adhesive wafer bonding requires nospecial wafer surface treatmentssuch as planarisation.Structures and particles at the wafer surfaces can be toleratedand compensated for some extent by the adhesive material.Adhesive wafer bonding is a comparably simple, robust andlowcost bonding process. In this thesis, adhesive wafer bondingtechniques with different polymer adhesives have beendeveloped. The relevant bonding parameters needed to achievehigh quality and high yield wafer bonds have been investigated.A selective adhesive wafer bonding process has also beendeveloped that allows localised bonding on lithographicallydefined wafer areas.</p><p>Adhesive wafer bonding has been utilised in variousapplication areas. A novel CMOS compatible film, device andmembrane transfer bonding technique has been developed. Thistechnique allows the integration of standard CMOS circuits withthin film transducers that can consist of practically any typeof crystalline or noncrystalline high performance material(e.g. monocrystalline silicon, gallium arsenide,indium-phosphide, etc.). The transferred transducers or filmscan be thinner than 0.3 µm. The feature sizes of thetransferred transducers can be below 1.5 µm and theelectrical via contacts between the transducers and the newsubstrate wafer can be as small as 3x3 µm2. Teststructures for temperature coefficient of resistancemeasurements of semiconductor materials have been fabricatedusing device transfer bonding. Arrays of polycrystallinesilicon bolometers for use in uncooled infrared focal planearrays have been fabricated using membrane transfer bonding.The bolometers consist of free-hanging membrane structures thatare thermally isolated from the substrate wafer. Thepolycrystalline silicon bolometers are fabricated on asacrificial substrate wafer. Subsequently, they are transferredand integrated on a new substrate wafer using membrane transferbonding. With the same membrane transfer bonding technique,arrays of torsional monocrystalline silicon micromirrors havebeen fabricated. The mirrors have a size of 16x16 µm2 anda thickness of 0.34 µm. The advantages of micromirrorsmade of monocrystalline silicon are their flatness, uniformityand mechanical stability. Selective adhesive wafer bonding hasbeen used to fabricate very shallow cavities that can beutilised in packaging and component protection applications. Anew concept is proposed that allows hermetic sealing ofcavities fabricated using adhesive wafer bonding. Furthermore,microfluidic devices, channels and passive valves for use inmicro total analysis systems are presented.</p><p>Adhesive wafer bonding is a generic CMOS compatible bondingtechnique that can be used for fabrication and integration ofvarious microsystems such as infrared focal plane arrays,spatial light modulators, microoptical systems, laser systems,MEMS, RF-MEMS and stacking of active electronic films forthree-dimensional high-density integration of electroniccircuits. Adhesive wafer bonding can also be used forfabrication of microcavities in packaging applications, forwafer-level stacking of integrated circuit chips (e.g. memorychips) and for fabrication of microfluidic systems.</p>

Manufacturing equipments in semiconductor factories (fabs) provide abundant data and opportunities for data-driven process monitoring and modeling. In particular, virtual metrology (VM) is an active area of research. Traditional monitoring techniques using univariate statistical process control charts do not provide immediate feedback to quality excursions, hindering the implementation of fab-wide advanced process control initiatives. VM models or inferential sensors aim to bridge this gap by predicting of quality measurements instantaneously using tool fault detection and classification (FDC) sensor measurements. The existing research in the field of inferential sensor and VM has focused on comparing regressions algorithms to demonstrate their feasibility in various applications. However, two important areas, data pretreatment and post-deployment model maintenance, are usually neglected in these discussions. Since it is well known that the industrial data collected is of poor quality, and that the semiconductor processes undergo drifts and periodic disturbances, these two issues are the roadblocks in furthering the adoption of inferential sensors and VM models. In data pretreatment, batch data collected from FDC systems usually contain inconsistent trajectories of various durations. Most analysis techniques requires the data from all batches to be of same duration with similar trajectory patterns. These inconsistencies, if unresolved, will propagate into the developed model and cause challenges in interpreting the modeling results and degrade model performance. To address this issue, a Constrained selective Derivative Dynamic Time Warping (CsDTW) method was developed to perform automatic alignment of trajectories. CsDTW is designed to preserve the key features that characterizes each batch and can be solved efficiently in polynomial time. Variable selection after trajectory alignment is another topic that requires improvement. To this end, the proposed Moving Window Variable Importance in Projection (MW-VIP) method yields a more robust set of variables with demonstrably more long-term correlation with the predicted output. In model maintenance, model adaptation has been the standard solution for dealing with drifting processes. However, most case studies have already preprocessed the model update data offline. This is an implicit assumption that the adaptation data is free of faults and outliers, which is often not true for practical implementations. To this end, a moving window scheme using Total Projection to Latent Structure (T-PLS) decomposition screens incoming updates to separate the harmless process noise from the outliers that negatively affects the model. The integrated approach was demonstrated to be more robust. In addition, model adaptation is very inefficient when there are multiplicities in the process, multiplicities could occur due to process nonlinearity, switches in product grade, or different operating conditions. A growing structure multiple model system using local PLS and PCA models have been proposed to improve model performance around process conditions with multiplicity. The use of local PLS and PCA models allows the method to handle a much larger set of inputs and overcome several challenges in mixture model systems. In addition, fault detection sensitivities are also improved by using the multivariate monitoring statistics of these local PLS/PCA models. These proposed methods are tested on two plasma etch data sets provided by Texas Instruments. In addition, a proof of concept using virtual metrology in a controller performance assessment application was also tested.

This thesis focuses on the use of surface modifiers to tune the properties of both metals and metal oxides. Particular attention is given to examine the modification of transparent conducting oxides (TCOs) including indium tin oxide and zinc oxide both through the use of phosphonic acids as well as organic and metal-organic dopants. In this thesis a variety of known and new phosphonic acids are synthesized. A subset of these molecules are then used to probe the relationship between the ability of a phosphonic acid to tune the work function of ITO and how that interrelates with the coverage and molecular orientation of the modifier on the surface. Experimental techniques including XPS, UPS, and NEXAFS are coupled with theoretical DFT calculations in order to more closely examine this relationship. Literature surrounding the modification of zinc oxide with phosphonic acids is not as prevalent as that found for the modification of ITO. Thus, effort is placed on attempting to determine optimal modification conditions for phosphonic acids on zinc oxide. As zinc oxide is already a low work function metal oxide, modifiers were synthesized in an attempt to further decrease the work function of this substrate in an effort to minimize the barrier to carrier collection/injection. Etching of the substrate by phosphonic acids is also examined. In a related technique, n- and p-dopants are used to modify the surfaces of ITO, zinc oxide, and gold and it was found that the work function can be drastically altered, to approximately 3.3 – 3.6 eV for all three of the substrates examined. Surface reactions are straightforward to conduct typically taking only 60 s to achieve this change in work function.

We have advanced the state-of-the-art for nano-fabrication of carbon nanotube (CNT) based field emission devices, and have conducted experimental and theoretical investigations to better understand the reasons for the high reduced brightness achieved. We have demonstrated that once the CNT emitter failure modes are better understood and resolved, such CNT emitters can easily reach reduced brightness on the order of 10⁹ A m⁻² sr⁻¹ V⁻¹ and noise levels of about 1%. These results are about 10% better than the best brightness results from a nanotip emitter archived to date. Our CNT emitters have order of magnitude better reduced brightness than state-of-the-art commercial Schottky emitters. Our analytical models of field emission matched our experimental results well. The CNT emitter was utilized in a modified commercial scanning electron microscope (SEM) and briefly operated to image a sample. We also report a successful emission from a lateral CNT emitter element having a single suspended CNT, where the electron emission is from the CNT sidewall. The lateral CNT emitters have reduced brightness on the order of 10⁸ A m⁻² sr⁻¹ V⁻¹, about 10X less than the vertical CNT emitters we fabricated and analyzed. The characteristics of the lateral field emitter were analyzed for manually fabricated and directly grown CNT emitters. There was no significant difference in performance based on the way the CNT emitter was fabricated. We showed that the fabrication technique for making a single CNT emitter element can be scaled to an array of elements, with potential density of 10⁶-10⁷ CNT emitters per cm². We also report a new localized, site selective technique for editing carbon nanotubes using water vapor and a focused electron beam. We have demonstrated the use of this technique to cut CNTs to length with 10s of nanometers precision and to etch selected areas from CNTs with 10s of nanometers precision. The use of this technique was demonstrated by editing a lateral CNT emitter. We have conducted investigations to demonstrate the effects of higher local water pressure on the CNT etching efficiency. This was achieved by developing a new method of localized gas delivery with a nano-manipulator. / text