The EBPG5200 will be installed in the Nano3 cleanroom facility at the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2) and will be used for nano- and microfabrication, enabling basic and applied r&d for hundreds of academic and industrial users.
The extension of the facility was assisted by funding from the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI-R2) programme of the National Science Foundation (NSF) in the US and from UC San Diego, its Jacobs School of Engineering, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, the UC San Diego School of Medicine, and Calit2/Nano3.
In addition to providing essential nanofabrication capabilities for research on electronic and photonic materials and devices, Nano3 will aid research in the emerging, interdisciplinary and rapidly growing fields of biomedical and biochemical devices, monolithic and heterogeneous integrated electronic and photonic devices and circuits, and sensor technology.
“We are looking forward to working with a high-performance instrument such as Vistec’s EBPG5200 system,” said UC San Diego electrical and computer engineering Professor Shaya Fainman, principal investigator on the NSF MRI-R2 proposal.
“It will enable us to make major advances in nanoscale science and technology research and it will also fundamentally strengthen the research environment of the university as a whole in these emerging fields.”
The equipment will initially be used in the areas of nanophotonics for intra-chip communication, nanomagnetics for data storage, and tissue engineering for biomedical applications, but other ongoing projects will also benefit from the installation. These will include radio frequency micro- and nanoelectro-mechanical systems; the study of novel photonic phenomena at the interface between the classical and quantum regimes of thermo-electric materials and nanoscale electronic devices.
The EBPG5200 system is equipped with a 50MHz pattern generator and full 20-bit address technology. As a special characteristic, it is able to operate with 20, 50 and 100kV accelerating voltage.
Rainer Schmid, general manager at Vistec Lithography, said: “Thanks to its high resolution and beam stability, our system is set routinely to generate structures of less than 8nm on varying substrates sizes enabling full patterning across a 200mm diameter.”
