All,

I am please to announce that we have crossed the most significant 
hurdles in the etcher installation project.  We have two of the three 
County signatures required for completion of the installation project.  
The two signatures we have are the most difficult to obtain.  I 
anticipate receiving the final signature early next week.  The timing 
works out well as both Oxford and Plasma-Therm are scheduled to begin 
the process start-up on all four tools next week.  I anticipate the 
start-up effort to take one or two weeks for all the tools.  Once the 
tools pass the companies start-up procedures they will be released to 
the SNF.

Having the tools released to the SNF does not mean they are ready for 
general use.  The performance of the tools need to be documented (some 
companies call this finger printing of the tool).  The idea is to 
capture the performance of items such as pump down curves, leak-up 
rates, source power curves, heating and cooling rates, pressure vs. 
flow, etc...  Once this is accomplished we will need to look at the 
robustness of the standard, factory recommended recipes.  This will 
involve running some DoE experiments of the base recipes.  The object 
here is to understand and document the various input parameters with the 
resulting outputs.  While this information is being collected we will 
work with lab member community to identify specific etching needs which 
need to be developed.  We will assemble the requests and develop simple 
screening and Response Surface DoE's to help us develop a suite of recipes.

In order to expedite the learning process, I am asking interested lab 
members, who are willing to help define, run and characterize the 
resulting DoE wafer splits.  If you are willing to contribute to the 
community knowledge base please contact Ed Myers.  If you have specific 
needs for your etch, please send me these requirements so we can add it 
the required development list.

As a reminder the new etch tools include:
Plasma-Therm dielectric etcher
Plasma-Therm metal etcher
Plasma-Therm deep silicon etcher
Oxford III-V or compound semiconductor etcher

Regards,
SNF Staff