Smart Cut Technology
Smart Cut, today the industry standard, is Soitec’s proprietary engineered wafer technology. Based on CVD techniques, Smart Cut technology’s revolutionary wafer bonding and layer splitting processes made it possible to transfer a thin layer of crystalline material from a donor substrate to another substrate, overcoming physical limitations and changing the face of the substrate industry.
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Most of today’s industry-leading SOI wafers ...
Most of today’s industry-leading SOI wafers destined for chip manufacturing are made by wafer suppliers using the Smart Cut technology. The Smart Cut technology is also behind the development of new families of standard and custom engineered wafers.
The Soitec Smart Cut technology was developed in collaboration with CEA-Leti, one of the world’s premier microelectronics research laboratories. The technology was particularly made viable for high-volume commercial production by Soitec, and is now protected by more than 3,000 Soitec-owned or controlled patents. Soitec leverages the Smart Cut technology to fabricate engineered wafers for the world’s leading chipmakers, and licenses this technology. Japanese silicon supplier Shin Etsu Handotai was the first company to license the Smart Cut technology.
The Smart Cut technology can make use of both implantation of light ions and wafer bonding to define and transfer ultra-thin single-crystal layers from one substrate to another. The Smart Cut technology works like an atomic scalpel, and allows active layers to be managed independently from the supporting mechanical substrate.
This combination implantation and wafer bonding provides multiple advantages:
- By implanting a light elements, layers can be engineered with no defects on the transferred layer.
- The thickness of the transferred layer can be determined with a high degree of precision by adjusting the implantation energy.
- Thickness uniformity is guaranteed by fine-tuning control of the implanted species over the entire wafer surface.
- Wafer bonding is suitable for multiple materials and a wide range of temperatures, opening the door to innovative alternatives when thermal expansion prohibits deposition.
- The donor substrate can be reused many times; after each layer transfer operation, the surface is refreshed and the substrate can be used again.
The Smart Cut technology has withstood the test of time in volume manufacturing, and offers a slate of proven industrial advantages:
- it is based on standard semiconductor-industry tools and can be scaled to multiple diameters.
- The range of possible thicknesses of the top Si and buried oxide layers offers substantial flexibility.
- Extremely high quality in terms of uniformity, bonding interfaces, and control of thickness variability is unmatched by any other process.
Soitec’s SOI is used in a very broad spectrum of consumer chip applications.
The Smart Cut technology, in combination with other substrate materials and technologies in the Soitec portfolio, also provides manufacturers with new opportunities for innovation and differentiation in growing and emerging fields like 3D applications, LEDs, photonics, display panels, and solar cells.
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