Ibis Introduces low dose oxygen wafers
06/01/1997
Ibis introduces low dose oxygen wafers
Using a low dose oxygen implantation process, Ibis Technology Corp., Danvers, MA, is producing a new SIMOX silicon-on-insulator (SOI) thin buried oxide wafer for advanced CMOS devices.
The company has released the new ADVANTOX wafer product from its R&D program, and began full production at the end of March, according to Al Alioto, Ibis` VP of sales and marketing. The wafers are now in beta testing with several US companies, and are being evaluated by Mitsubishi Electric and Ibis` exclusive Japanese distributor, Mitsubishi Materials. "Much of the recent Japanese market requirements have been almost exclusively for low dose SIMOX-SOI material, particularly for high performance, low power applications using fully depleted CMOS SOI," Alioto said.
With a buried oxide layer thickness of about 1150 ??, the ADVANTOX`s reduced processing time yields a higher quality top silicon layer, according to Ibis. In comparison, the company`s previous product releases, the ULSI and Standard, have buried oxide layers of 2000 and 4000 ? thick, respectively. Alioto said the company`s goal is to manufacture SIMOX-SOI wafers with high quality buried oxide layers of between 500 and 800 ? thick. While current technology can already produce oxide layers measuring 500 ?, "the problem is to get the (buried oxide) to be continuous across the wafer and be basically pinhole free," he said. "There`s nothing magic in the angstrom."
Alioto said the new SIMOX-SOI wafer can be manufactured at about half the cost of its Standard wafer. The low dose oxygen implantation process used on the ADVANTOX wafer increases throughput of the company`s implanters by as much as 300% over the Standard wafer oxygen implantation process.
According to the Materials Research Report published by Rose Associates, Mitsubishi Electric has had some success with SOI wafers. Using SOI, the company said, it has developed a 16-Mbit DRAM chip with the access speed of a 64-Mbit device. It is slated for sampling in 1998. - Christine Lunday, WaferNews