The James Watt Nanofabrication Centre in Glasgow has expanded its semiconductor manufacturing capability for optical chips and biotechnology devices.
The Glasgow-based research centre is an important part of the UK’s microelectronics R&D community and it has added a PlasmaPro System100 ICP plasma etch system to its existing installed base of Oxford Instruments etch and deposition tools.
It will be used to etch compound semiconductors materials used in applications such as optoelectronics, mm-wave & terahertz, bioengineering, biotechnology, lab-on-a-chip, energy harvesting and photovoltaics.
“As a company Oxford Instruments is focussed on developing leading edge tools for research and development, and this additional system order for Oxford Instruments tools emphasises our commitment to providing the research equipment of choice for the University of Glasgow,” said Mark Vosloo, sales and marketing director at Oxford Instruments.
“We have used their tools for many years, and continue to use them to develop new etch and deposition processes for nanofabrication as we push technology below 5 nm feature sizes,” said Prof Douglas Paul, Professor of Semiconductor Devices and Director of the James Watt Nanofabrication Centre,
“Maintaining our equipment is vital in order to maximise our usage and investment, and we are extremely satisfied with the consistent high levels of support we receive from Oxford Instruments,” said Paul.
The Glasgow James Watt Nanofabrication Centre was built in 2005 bringing together all the nanofabrication tools in the University of Glasgow.
The Centre houses over £20m of nanofabrication and nano-characterisation equipment which is run and maintained in a pseudo-industrial operation.
The University of Glasgow specialises in nanofabrication and this now allows patterns, devices and systems all to be fabricated or built with length scales from a few atoms across (about a nanometre) up to many 10s of centimetres.
Glasgow University presently holds the world record for the smallest metal pattern produced by electron beam lithography at 3 nm, the world record for the best layer to layer alignment accuracy (this is 0.46nm which is 2 silicon atoms and is over 15 times better than anyone else internationally), the fastest mode locked laser at 2.1 THz, the lowest loss silicon waveguides at telecoms wavelengths and up until 2 years ago we held the world record for the fastest transistor.
Present research is trying to produce 10 nm gate-length high electron mobility transistors to recover this world record.
The Centre has £53m of active research grants and industrial contracts. We collaborate and work with over 50 Scottish, UK and International companies as well as using a University of Glasgow spin-out company, Kelvin Nanotechnology Ltd., to provide industrial access to the facilities at commercial rates.