Electronics industry, microelectronic fabrication

Polymers have played an important role in the electronics industry as component structures and in manufacturing of microelectronics devices such as microprocessors and memory chips. The wide-spread use of polymeric materials arises from its film-forming properties, ease of fabrication, and especially the ability to synthesize and modify such materials for specific functionalities. Furthermore, patterning of such polymeric materials in a pm-run scale is a key technology in electronic device manufacturing. 

The history of ceramics is as old as civilization, and our use of ceramics is a measure of the technological progress of a civilization. Ceramics have important effects on human history and human civilization. Earlier transitional ceramics, several thousand years ago, were made by clay minerals such as kaolinite. Modem ceramics are classified as advanced and fine ceramics. Both include three distinct material categories oxides such as alumina and zirconia, nonoxides such as carbide, boride, nitride, and silicide, as well as composite materials such as particulate reinforced and fiber reinforced combinations of oxides and nonoxides. These advanced ceramics, made by modem chemical compounds, can be used in the fields of mechanics, metallurgy, chemistry, medicine, optical, thermal, magnetic, electrical and electronics industries, because of the suitable chemical and physical properties. In particular, photoelectron and microelectronics devices, which are the basis of the modern information era, are fabricated by diferent kinds of optical and electronic ceramics. In other words, optical and electronic ceramics are the base materials of the modern information era. 

This leads us to another important category of multi-electron photoprocesses involving the semiconductor itself. While photocorrosion is a nuisance from a device operation perspective, it is an important component of a device fabrication sequence in the microelectronics industry. Two types of wet etching of semiconductors can be envisioned [290]. Both occur at open-circuit but one involves the action of chemical agents that cause the simultaneous rupture and formation of bonds. This is exemplified by the action of H2O2 on GaAs [291] ... 

Polyimides have been widely used in the advanced microelectronics industry such as passivation or stress-relief layers for high-density electronic packaging, interlayer dielectric layers for wafer-level semiconductor fabrication, or alignment layers for liquid crystals in advanced liquid crystal display devices (LCDs) owing to their outstanding thermal, mechanical and good insulation properties with low dielectric constant, good adhesion to common substrates and superior chemical... 

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