Microelectronics industry

Metal to ceramic (oxide) adhesion is very important to the microelectronics industry. An electron transfer model by Burlitch and co-workers [75] shows the importance of electron donating capability in enhancing adhesion. Their calculations are able to explain the enhancement in adhesion when a NiPt layer is added to a Pt-NiO interface. 

Undeniably, one of the most important teclmological achievements in the last half of this century is the microelectronics industry, the computer being one of its outstanding products. Essential to current and fiiture advances is the quality of the semiconductor materials used to construct vital electronic components. For example, ultra-clean silicon wafers are needed. Raman spectroscopy contributes to this task as a monitor, in real time, of the composition of the standard SC-1 cleaning solution (a mixture of water, H2O2 and NH OH) [175] that is essential to preparing the ultra-clean wafers. 

CVD gaseous reactants (precursors) delivered to a heated substrate in a flow reactor undergo tliennal reaction to deposit solid films at atmospheric or reduced pressure, and volatile side products are pumped away. CVD is used for conductors, insulators and dielectrics, elemental semiconductors and compound semiconductors and is a workliorse in tire silicon microelectronics industry. 

Photoresist appHcations in the microelectronics industry have also been disclosed (340). Thermally stable ben2yl sulfonate esters based on 2-methyl-3-nitroben2otrifluoride [6656-49-1] can serve as nonionic photoacid generators to promote a cascade of reactions during irradiation of the resist. 

Fig. 3. Scanned laser imaging device for LPCVD in the microelectronics industry (48).

In the microelectronics industry, powdered metals and insulating materials that consist of noimoble metals and oxides are deposited by screen printing in order to form coatings with high resistivities and low temperature coefficients of resistance. This technique may be useful in depositing oxide—metal refractory coatings. 

The advantage of the activated displacement polymerization is the facile incorporation of different and unconventional structural units in the polymer backbone. Most of the heteroarylene activated polyethers prepared by this route are soluble in many organic solvents. The solubility behavior of new polyethers is shown in Table 8. In contrast to many polyphenylenequi-noxalines, poly(aryl ether phenylquinoxalines) prepared by the quionoxaline activated displacement reaction are soluble in NMP. Solubility in NMP is important since it is frequently used for polymer processing in the microelectronics industry [27]. 

Chemical vapor deposition is distinguished from physical vapor deposition processes by the use of a chemical reaction, usually a decomposition, to create the chemical species that is deposited. An example important to the microelectronics industry is the formation of polycrystalline silicon by the decomposition of silane ... 

The acoustic microscopy s primary application to date has been for failure analysis in the multibillion-dollar microelectronics industry. The technique is especially sensitive to variations in the elastic properties of semiconductor materials, such as air gaps. SAM enables nondestructive internal inspection of plastic integrated-circuit (IC) packages, and, more recently, it has provided a tool for characterizing packaging processes such as die attachment and encapsulation. Even as ICs continue to shrink, their die size becomes larger because of added functionality in fact, devices measuring as much as 1 cm across are now common. And as die sizes increase, cracks and delaminations become more likely at the various interfaces. 

In-house materials development is most prevalent in the microelectronics industry, even down to polymer substrates for circuit lithography. Here, companies such as AT T and IBM have established some of the most impressive polymer science laboratories in the world to design and develop polymer systems for their own microelectronic products. They recover their development costs from the margins on final products. 

Applications Real applications of spark-source MS started on an empirical basis before fundamental insights were available. SSMS is now considered obsolete in many areas, but various unique applications for a variety of biological substances and metals are reported. Usually, each application requires specific sample preparation, sparking procedure and ion detection. SSMS is now used only in a few laboratories worldwide. Spark-source mass spectrometry is still attractive for certain applications (e.g. in the microelectronics industry). This is especially so when a multi-element survey analysis is required, for which the accuracy of the technique is sufficient (generally 15-30% with calibration or within an order of magnitude without). SSMS is considered to be a... 

All materials will, to some degree, be subject to corrosion and oxidation by their environment, and the critical early stages of attack can often be understood through the use of surface analytical techniques. A similar approach is required to gain an understanding of the fundamental and applied aspects of surface catalysis, which is of great importance in the petrochemical industry. The microelectronics industry has also contributed to the development of modern surface analytical techniques, where there is a necessity to analyse dopant concentration profiles while retaining lateral resolution on the device of better than one micron. 

Parallel developments in the physical chemistry of surfaces have also proceeded rapidly during the same period. An extensive battery of new spectroscopic and microscopic techniques have brought analysis and even observation down to the molecular and atomic ideal of seeing and manipulating these ultimate units of chemistry. Much of the driving force for these advances has come from the microelectronics industry, where the ability towards mass production of microstructures approaching nanometer dimensions is proceeding with remarkable speed and success. 

The advent of a new class of materials systems based on nanoscale particles dispersed or suspended in carrier and/or binders has captured the attention of the microelectronics technical community. These materials provide the opportunity to use inexpensive solution processing equipment versus expensive vacuum deposition equipment commonly used in the microelectronics manufacturing industry. Experts in the microelectronics industry have suggested that over the course of the next live years, the industry will experience a paradigm shift in manufacturing and, more importantly, will enjoy revenue streams created from never-before-seen products based on printed electronics. 

Noncontact printing is used in the microelectronics industry to print low-viscosity electronic-grade materials solder fluxes, dielectric films, anti-static... 

Perfluoropolyethers emerged on the market in the early 1970s. The first perfluoropolyether was the homopolymer of hexafluoropropylene oxide produced by DuPont, which has the structure [—CF2CF(CF3)0—] and this new lubricant material was called Krytox.31,32 Krytox was and is used in most of the vacuum pumps and diffusion oil pumps for the microelectronics industry because it does not produce any hydrocarbon or fluorocarbon vapor contamination. It also has important applications in the lubrication of computer tapes and in other data processing as well as military and space applications. 

Apart from new low-dielectric materials, a clean method to deposit the dielectric as a uniform film is also required. Owing to the way fabrication technology in the microelectronics industry has developed and because larger silicon wafers (> 8 in.) are being used (currently, the technical difficulty of... 

In this paper the planarizing properties of some commercially available resins and monomers are evaluated. Other important properties such as etching resistance, film absorbance and glass transition temperature Tg are reported and discussed. Some of the materials that we evaluated are not marketed for use in the microelectronics industry. Consequently, they are not available as filtered spin coating solutions and may contain high levels of metal impurities that adversely affect device performance. 

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