ECS-9708631 Kamen In this proposal, The Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) and FAStar, Ltd. (FAS) will collaborate to advance polymer deposition technology for large area substrates used in integrated circuits, flat panel displays, multichip modules and solar cells. The advances will be made in extrusion coating process control with the effect of the work being to enhance the performance of the deposition tool and significantly reduce the cost of polymer material through waste minimization by applying FAS's deposition technique to microelectronics fabrication. Polymer deposition is not only essential to the manufacture of integrated circuits, it is repeated many times in the making of each circuit. Spin coating is the most prevalent method used in industry today to deposit polymers onto microelectronic substrates. As the industry increases substrate size, the cost of each circuit decreases because more circuits are fabricated each time a substrate is processed. However, spinning large substrates is challenged by rotational inertia, coating uniformity and again material loss. Tool vendors have developed and recently begun to market alternative coating methods. These deposition methods include curtain coating, meniscus coating and extrusion coating. Process control improvements are a vital need for these new, low per-unit cost production methods to be accepted and utilized by the microelectronic industry.
