Cleanroom and Silicon Technology

Focus of our research and development work in the field of silicon and thin film technology is on realization of innovative sensors and system components according to our customers’ needs. We elaborate sophisticated, targeted solutions far beyond the common state-of-the-art with respect to functionality, performance and demand to fabrication technology.

Your advantage

For our customers from the fields of industrial metrology and analytics, medicine and aerospace, we pave the ground for novel, innovative product applications. Clients and partners from research receive customized solutions matching their special technical measurement issues. Our service portfolio comprises design and simulation, process development, realization of demonstrators for the verification of feasibility, pilot series in documented quality for further validation by the customer in product use.

Our success factors

Requesting our research and development services you can rely on our steadily grown long-time expertise in design and realization of custom MEMS sensors and components. We have a high-performance cleanroom process line at our disposal including comprehensive metrology for quality inspection and control. Some of our dedicated MEMS specific processes which we use at highest level for application deployment are given in the following:

• thick-layer resists and resist spray coating for realization and processing of 3D topologies by means of UV lithography,
• wet and dry chemical deep structuring of silicon including SOI wafer processing,
• film stress optimized PECVD and LPCVD processes, for instance for realization of thin, self-supporting functional elements and free-standing membranes,
• multitarget and reactive gas sputtering, for instance for the deposition of alloys and oxidic functional layers,
• micro electroplating and electroforming of, for instance, noble metals such as gold and platinum with a layer thickness of up to several 10 µm or, respectively, low-stress copper and nickel deposits up to a thickness of several millimeters,
• assembly and packaging technologies, for instance flip-chip and wire bonding for electrical contacting or creation of silicon-silicon and silicon-glass stacks on wafer level.

Some recent showcase solutions

Examples for application developments performed on direct customer’s order or in the course of research partnerships are:

• 3D force sensors for pressure and shear forces with piezo resistive transducers,
• flow rate sensors for gases and liquids,
• density sensor for liquids based on a microfluidic U-tube resonator,
• helium and hydrogen detection via highly selective thin film membranes,
• bolometer sensors for fusion research with high radiation and temperature resistance,
• micro electrode structures for electrochemical analysis,
• flexible and rigid multichannel micro electrode probes for neuroscience research and neuroprosthetics, 
• microoptical components such as flow-through cells and precision slits.