FESEM

Under vacuum, electrons generated by a field emission source are accelerated in a field gradient. A detector catches the secondary electrons and an image of the sample surface is constructed by comparing the intensity of these secondary electrons to the scanning primary electron beam. The following FESEM has a magnification of 20x to 30000x. The smallest length it can display is 2.5 nm at 30 kilovolts.

Keithley Parameter Analyzer

The Four-Point Probe is used for characterizing the electrical behavior of electronic devices as well as sheet resistance measurements. This system can plot capacitance as a function of voltage (C-V) and current as a function of voltage (I-V). The capacitance measuring unit has a precision of 10 fF.

DekTak Surface Profiler

The DekTak is a system that can analyze surface vertical profiles. The minimum height precision of the system is 10 Angstroms in a 50 micron to 30 millimeter horizontal line. Currently it can measure up to 10 nanometers. The maximum step measured by this system is 65.5 microns.

Bonder

Bonder is used for wire-bonding of the terminals of  electronic devices. This system uses a high pressure needle and ultrasonic force. The substrate is heated and when the gold string collides with the gold substrate a bond is formed. Both manual and automatic systems are currently used in the lab.

Automatic Dicing Saw

Wafer dicing is the process by which die are separated from a wafer of semiconductor following the processing of the wafer. The dicing saw is used to cut wafers mechanically into chips for further processing with very high precision.