Modifications of surface morphology significantly improve integration possibilities and properties of materials in NEMS, MEMS and μTAS, especially of fused silica. Self-organized nanostructures in fused silica, termed 'glass grass', produced by plasma dry etching methods are investigated. These structures appear as 'grass', 'needles', 'pillars' or even 'tubes' depending on etching conditions. A comprehensive study of surface morphology modification parameters, regarding reactive ion etching (RIE) and deep reactive ion etching (DRIE) (inductive coupled plasma (ICP)), is presented. The nanostructures are described and characterized by shape, geometry and density with scanning electron microscopy and energy dispersive x-ray. The influences of coil/platen power, flow rates, etch gases, pressure and etch time on the geometry are derived. Application experiments, such as bonding technologies, which support integration into hybrid material systems, and cell adhesion investigations, are carried out.
In this paper, we report a hierarchical simulation study of the electromigration problem in Cu-CNT composite interconnects. Our work is based on the investigation of the activation energy and self-heating temperature using a multiscale electro-thermal simulation framework. We first investigate the electrical and thermal properties of Cu-CNT composites, including contact resistances, using the Density Functional Theory and Reactive Force Field approaches, respectively. The corresponding results are employed in macroscopic electro-thermal simulations taking into account the self-heating phenomenon. Our simulations show that although Cu atoms have similar activation energies in both bulk Cu and Cu-CNT composites, Cu-CNT composite interconnects are more resistant to electromigration thanks to the large Lorenz number of the CNTs. Moreover, we found that a large and homogenous conductivity along the transport direction in interconnects is one of the most important design rules to minimize the electromigration.
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