Picosun Oy, the leading provider of high quality Atomic Layer Deposition (ALD) solutions for industrial manufacturing, and Carleton University, Canada, report uniform ALD gold deposition on complete silicon wafers.
The gold films were prepared using PICOSUN™ plasma ALD tool and a new gold precursor developed by Prof. Seán Barry. The novel process was described in the talk given at the AVS 15th ALD meeting held in Portland, USA.
Image credit: The Barry Lab, Carleton University
Gold is a highly sought-after material in today’s microelectronics, optoelectronics, and microsystems manufacturing.
Due to its excellent chemical inertness and high thermal and electrical conductivity it has a plethora of applications for example in 3D packaging (via interconnects), wafer metallization, and heat dissipation of IC components, and preparation of electrical connections, structural layers, and electrodes for MEMS devices.
“We have worked on gold metal deposition chemistry for a few years now, and this process is a breakthrough. Our PICOSUN™ ALD system handles a wide variety of precursors beautifully, and its ease of use has made process development for challenging materials much easier. The uniformity that we are able to achieve with the PICOSUN™ plasma ALD tool is very impressive,” states Seán Barry, Associate Professor of the Department of Chemistry, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada.
“We are excited about these recent advances in gold deposition by ALD. Picosun’s plasma ALD technology is optimal for metal deposition. This has enabled gold manufacturing also before, but the now published, larger scale results will definitely catch the interest of a vast number of our production customers in IC, MEMS, and electronics industries,” summarizes Dr. Wei-Min Li, Applications Director of Picosun.
About Picosun
Picosun provides the most advanced ALD thin film technology and enables the industrial leap into the future by novel, cutting-edge coating solutions, with four decades of continuous expertise in the field. Today, PICOSUN™ ALD systems are in daily production use in numerous major industries around the world. Picosun is based in Finland, with subsidiaries in USA, China, Taiwan, and Singapore, and a world-wide sales and support network.
About Carleton University
Located in the nation’s capital, Carleton University is a dynamic research and teaching institution with a tradition of leading change. Its internationally recognized faculty, staff and researchers provide more than 27,000 full- and part-time students from every province and more than 100 countries around the world with academic opportunities. Carleton’s creative, interdisciplinary and international approach to research has led to many significant discoveries and creative works in science and technology, business, governance, public policy and the arts. As an innovative institution, Carleton is uniquely committed to developing solutions to real-world problems.