A lot of credit goes to Amani – she has patiently learnt and
tried and failed and retried and then succeeded today by having fruit of her
work (mentored by Galo) published in Appl. Phys. Lett.
High performance high-κ/metal gate CMOS circuit element
on flexible silicon
G. A. Torres Sevilla, A. S. Almuslem, A. Gumus, A. M.
Hussain, M. E. Cruz, and M. M. Hussain
First two authors contributed equally
Thinned silicon based complementary metal oxide
semiconductor (CMOS) electronics can be physically flexible. To overcome
challenges of limited thinning and damaging of devices originated from back
grinding process, we show sequential reactive ion etching of silicon with the
assistance from soft polymeric materials to efficiently achieve
thinned (40 µm) and flexible (1.5 cm bending
radius) silicon based functional CMOS inverters with high-κ/metal gate
transistors. Notable advances through this study shows large area of silicon
thinning with pre-fabricated high performance elements with
ultra-large-scale-integration density (using 90 nm node technology) and then
dicing of such large and thinned (seemingly fragile) pieces into smaller pieces
using Excimer laser. Impact of various mechanical bending and bending cycles
show undeterred high performance of flexible silicon CMOS inverters. Future
work will include transfer of diced silicon chips to destination site, interconnects
and packaging to obtain fully flexible electronic systems in CMOS compatible
way.
Hello world!
We are now ready to transfer and package – the last frontier
interconnecting is also on site …