Foundry services

Researcher inside of one of the CPFC facilities

With years of industry-based experience and state of the art facilities, CPFC experts have the ability to deliver foundry solutions for early-stage prototyping and small-to-medium volume production runs of photonic devices and photonic integrated circuits, in either III-V compound semiconductor or silicon-based materials. CPFC staff has a clear understanding of current photonic technologies and product applications as well as industry standard, commercial manufacturing processes. By outsourcing to CPFC, customers reduce development time and reduce costs by not operating a dedicated internal fabrication facility.

CPFC offers a comprehensive suite of fee-based services including design and modelling, epitaxy, fabrication, and test and characterization. Our services range in complexity from feasibility studies to single-step foundry deliverables to complete custom solutions. We also provide nanoimprint lithography and consulting services.

Epitaxy

CPFC operates a metal organic chemical vapour deposition (MOCVD) reactor with ample capacity for development and production of GaAs- and InP-based wafers. CPFC is capable of growing single and multiple 2", 3", 4" and 6" diameter GaAs- and InP-based wafers to meet a variety of device needs. Our team of experienced manufacturing professionals has expertise in growing a wide range of custom designed epitaxial structures.

Recognizing that time-to-market is critical to customers' success, CPFC strives to provide the fastest turnaround times possible for epitaxial products. CPFC can also assure excellent quality and performance using epitaxy specific metrology in support of the production of epitaxial wafers.

GaAs and InP-based wafers

CPFC offers epitaxial growth in the following material systems:

  • InP;
  • InGaAsP (lattice matched to InP or GaAs);
  • GaAs;
  • AlGaAs/GaAs - InAlAs/InP; and
  • InGaAlAs/InP.

Custom-designed epitaxial structures

A wide range of active and passive device structures have been grown using the epitaxial and processing facilities within CPFC. Several of these device structures rely on the ability to re-grow epitaxial layers after some device fabrication steps have taken place.

These include:

  • Fabry Perot lasers;
  • distributed feedback (DFB) lasers;
  • buried heterostructure (BH) DFB lasers;
  • light emitting diodes (LED's);
  • quantum cascade lasers (QCL's);
  • optical waveguides - both III-V and Si-based;
  • Bragg mirror reflector stacks; and
  • saturable absorber mirrors.

Epitaxy specific metrology

The following list summarizes the specific metrology that the CPFC offers in support of its suite of epitaxial services:

  • in-situ reflectance growth rate monitoring and optical pyrometry;
  • double crystal X-ray diffraction (single point and mapping);
  • photoluminescence (PL) and reflectance (R) mapping;
  • Surfscan™ (for defect counting and mapping);
  • electrochemical (Polaron) profiling;
  • Hall effect;
  • Nomarski surface inspection;
  • SEM, AUGER, SIMS, TEM, AFM, STEM.

Nanoimprint lithography

Nanoimprint lithography combines the small critical dimensions of e-beam lithography with the high throughput of optical stepper technology, allowing for a cost effective solution for fine-line lithography. For customers with their own nanoimprint lithography tool, CPFC offers a template-making service. CPFC's wafer fabrication expertise, coupled with its step and flash nanoimprint lithography tool, can provide customers with custom wafers fabricated using the imprint process. The combination of an in-house template fabrication capability using optical and e-beam lithography tools, and a full service wafer fabrication facility focused on manufacturing devices, makes CPFC unique in the world.

Template making service

CPFC's e-beam lithography and foundry capabilities allow customized and fully verified nanoimprint lithography templates with critical dimensions less than 60 nanometres. CPFC can fabricate templates for a number of different nanoimprint lithography approaches, including step and flash, hot embossing and UV nanoimprinting. Verification through the use of SEM, AFM and other metrology techniques is conducted to ensure that CPFC-produced templates fully comply with the customer's specifications.

"Step and Flash" nanoimprint lithography

CPFC has chosen the "step and flash" method of nanoimprint lithography to extend its lithography capability to below 60nm. Step and flash nanoimprint lithography provides the optimum combination of resolution, throughput and flexibility with existing lithographic tool sets, thereby simplifying the integration of nanostructures into sophisticated photonic and electronic devices.