Silicon wafers are the most extensively used material for integrated circuit (IC) substrates. Before taking the form of a wafer, a single crystal silicon ingot must go through a series of machining processes, including slicing, lapping, surface grinding, edge profiling, and polishing. A key requirement of the processes is to produce extremely flat surfaces on work pieces up to 350 mm in diameter. A total thickness variation (TTV) of less than 15 µm is strictly demanded by the industry for an 0.18 µm IC process. Furthermore, the surfaces should be smooth (R a < 10 nm) and have minimum subsurface damage (< 10 µm) before the final etching and polishing. The end product should have crack-free mirror surfaces with a micro-roughness less than 1.8 Å. In this paper, experiments are conducted to investigate the effects of various parameters on the subsurface damage of ground silicon wafers.
High-density (3:0 Â 10 10 cm À2 ) InGaN/GaN multiple quantum well (MQW) nanorods were fabricated from an as-grown bulk light-emitting diode structure by inductively coupled plasma dry etching with self-assembled nickel metal nanomasks. The self-assembled nickel metal nanomasks were formed by rapid thermal annealing of a nickel metal film at 850 C for 1 min. The influence of the thicknesses of the Ni metal film on the dimensions and density of the nanorods was also investigated. The structural and optical properties of the InGaN/GaN MQW nanorods were established using field emission scanning electron microscopy, transmission electron microscopy and photoluminescence measurements. The diameters and heights of nanorods were estimated to be 60 to 100 nm and more than 0.28 mm, respectively. The peak emission wavelength of the nanorods showed a blue shift of 5.1 nm from that of the as-grown bulk. An enhancement by a factor of 5 in photoluminescence intensity of the nanorods compared with that of the as-grown bulk was observed. The blue shift is attributed to strain relaxation in the wells after dry etching, the quantum confinement effect, or a combination of the two, which results in the enhancement of emission intensity.
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