Acquisition of a Chemical Mechanical Polishing (CMP) System to Provide Planarization Capability within the Advanced Thin Film Devices Prototyping Facility at Carnegie Mellon U

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9977679BainThis grant will add a fundamental new thin film processing capability, namely chemical-mechanical polishing, or CMP, to the existing thin film device fabrication capability within the clean-room of Carnegie Mellon University. Specifically it will add a Strasbaugh 6EC laboratory planarization tool, a turnkey CMP system, and industry standard.Within the Carnegie Mellon clean-room, this process capability will be applied to the making of magnetic thin film devices, specifically recording heads. The CMP process will also be applied to the integration of magnetic thin film devices with the CMOS MEMS (Complimentary Metal Oxide Semiconductor Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems) device process that has been developed at CMU. The integration of the CMOS MEMS technology with magnetic devices is seen as an important step in the development of highly integrated computing systems that integrate massive amounts of nonvolatile storage with high speed computation capability. The CMOS MEMS process developed at CMU allows mechanical and magnetic devices to be closely integrated with active circuits, which are contained in the underlying layers. Constructing fine magnetic and mechanical geometries on top of a complete CMOS wafer requires that the topography of the CMOS layers be planadze& This allows the required depth of focus of the lithographic tool, and the thickness of the photoresist layers used to pattern the magnetic and mechanical devices to be minimized.***