At our Delft location, both at Else Kooij Laboratory (EKL) as at Kavli Nanolab and TNO, we successfully enrolled the new Lab Information System called NIS (NanoLabNL Information System). More than 400 users are currently using the software on a daily base to reserve their needed equipment. At Kavli the NIS software is also used for cleanroom access regulation, since the amount of available suits is not sufficient for the amount of all users. Later this year once the logbook module has been developed, we will also try to implement the logbook module in both cleanrooms.

Virtual cleanroom tour

Due to Corona, we are not able to arrange cleanroom visitor tours. All available cleanroom suits are dedicated for actual users and cleanroom staff. To overcome this adversity we asked some software programmers to develop a virtual tour through the Kavli cleanroom.

New equipment

Advanced Oxford ICP etcher @Delft

On the 9th of april 2021 The Netherlands’ National Growth Fund awarded NanoLabNL with €150 million to invest in sustaining and expanding the Dutch nanotechnological infrastructure. The grant allows NanoLabNL to invest in facilities. Also Delft was granted part of this amount to invest in high-tech equipment. The first equipment has been bought and is currently being installed in both labs.

To replace our 30+ year old GIR 300 chlorine etcher, we invested in an advanced Oxford ICP etcher. With this system we will be able to etch Silicon, diamond and III/V materials at elevated temperatures. Together with our other ICP chlorine etcher we will have the option to do high substrate temperature etching on the new system and the standard chlorine etching on our older ICP chlorine etcher.

System specifications

300W RF generator as substrate Bias, 3KW ICP source, Substrate table heater up to 400C, wafer clamping with adjustable clamping force and helium backside cooling, Adixen ATH 1600MT turbo, loadlock, variable wavelength Verity SD1024GH optical endpoint detection which allow us to stop etching at complex endpoint conditions.

With this system we will have an option to do isotropic diamond under etching and GaAs etching of photonic crystals.

ICP PECVD system

PlasmaPro 100 ICP PECVD

We also bought 2 PlasmaPro 100 ICP PECVD systems, one for EKL with the option to grow very uniform SiO2 layers (with TEOS) and one for Kavli to take away some of the workload of their PECVD system and also gain improved process possibilities.

Main advantages of these systems:

• SiO2 deposition at 20 degrees Celsius (up to 300 degrees Celsius).
• Higher quality films at lower deposition temperatures. For instance oxide quality (optical properties/BHF etch rate etc.) deposited with ICP PECVD at 70 degrees Celsius is comparable with 300 degrees Celsius deposited PECVD oxide. (data from Oxford instruments).
• Interleave cleaning: right after wafer unload into the load lock the chamber will run a short chamber cleaning process. This will improve deposition rate reproducibility, will cause lower particle generation and reduces the need of less mechanical cleaning of the system.