Intrinsic licenses "advanced" polishing process
Intrinsic Semiconductor has signed a license agreement for a SiC advanced chemical mechanical polishing (ACMP) process that was developed at Penn State Electro-Optics Center.
The US manufacturer of wide bandgap materials and devices plans to develop the ACMP process in a manufacturing environment, and then evaluate the quality of substrates and SiC and GaN epiwafers produced using this process.
The company says that the process eliminates the selectivity associated with the removal of material surrounding scratches and defects, and speeds up material removal from 20 nm/hour for a typical colloidal silica CMP to 150 nm/hour.
Characterization at Penn State using transmission electron microscopy, atomic force microscopy and white-light interferometry revealed that the ACMP process dramatically reduced scratch and dislocation densities in SiC substrates.
The Penn State team also compared the performance of devices fabricated on ACMP-processed SiC with commercially available substrates from two different vendors. Electrical measurements of GaN HEMT devices showed that the ACMP process improved the device's carrier mobility from 1700-2000 cm2/Vs to 2100 cm2/Vs.
