I hated when PhD candidate Galo Torres Sevilla was trying to catch his flight for year ending
holidays and he said he had flexed the SOI FinFETs with soft etch back. I hated so much the whole
thing. But now I am promoting it. Ladies and gentlemen: bring your ICs, we will
now flex it without any condition. Technically decade long process of back
grinding can be easily replaced with our soft etch back process. Way to go Galo
– you are now the academic research F1 champ with repeated block buster papers (Small, Adv. Mater,
and now ACS Nano)!!!
Flexible Nano-Scale High-Performance FinFETs
a‡,
Mohamed T. Ghoneim‡, Hossain Fahad‡, Jhonathan P. Rojas,
Aftab M. Hussain and Muhammad Mustafa Hussain*
‡Equally contributing authors
With the emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT), flexible
high performance nano-scale electronics are more desired. At the moment, FinFET
is the most advanced transistor architecture used in the state-of-the-art
micro-processors. Therefore, we show a soft-etch based substrate thinning
process to transform silicon-on-insulator (SOI) based nano-scale FinFET into
flexible FinFET and then conduct comprehensive electrical characterization
under various bending conditions to understand its electrical performance. Our
study shows that back-etch based substrate thinning process is gentler than
traditional abrasive back-grinding process, it can attain ultra-flexibility and
the electrical characteristics of the flexible nano-scale FinFET shows no
performance degradation compared to its rigid bulk counterpart indicating its
readiness to be used for flexible high-performance electronics.
Keep scoring …!