SNF etcher are fully permitted

All,

We are pleased to report all four of the new etchers (dielectric, metal,
deep silicon and the III-V) have completed the county permitting
process. We are now able to turn on all of the dozen, or so gases
plumbed to the systems. What remains ahead of us is the vendor start-up
of the tools and our etch process characterizations.

At this time, Plasma-Therm is doing their installation start-up tests on
the dielectric and metal etchers. Their deep silicon process engineer
will be on site next week. It is the expectation of Plasma-Therm that
all three of their etchers will be released to us by Friday, Sept.
28th. The Oxford III-V etcher is running a little slower. I have a
commitment from Oxford today saying they will have someone on site by no
later than Monday, Sept. 24th to complete the tool installation and
start-up. I believe the Oxford is running about a week behind the
Plasma-Therm systems and expect it to be released around Friday, Oct. 5th.

Once the tools are released, it is up the staff and the SNF community to
drive the characterization of the etches. The date for full release of
the systems depends on how much manpower we can pull together to work
through the characterizations. Each etch vendor has recommended recipes
for the more common etches. We need to verify and document the
performance for each of these recipes. This requires the correct
substrate material stacks, photolithography masking, etch recipe splits,
metrology for etch rates, selectivity, CD loss, sidewall profiles,
documentation of the operation procedures and updating the wiki. Each
recipe could take two full, hard weeks to collect all of this
information. When you multiply four etchers with multiple recipes, the
total characterization time expands quickly. If we all pull together we
could start opening these systems up to the community by the end of
October.

Regards,
SNF Staff