Newly developed photosensitive etch protection materials have key advantages over standard photoresists typically used in today's MEMS applications. Using these new materials eliminates the need for silicon nitride (SiN) masks deposited via CVD processes, which require significant investments in processing equipment, utilize extreme processing conditions and contribute to an overall decrease in throughput. This new technology will enhance throughput by reducing the number of process steps and simplify the process flow with minimal impact on overall undercut performance. The polymeric coating serves as a SiN mask replacement for etching silicon substrates in alkaline anisotropic etchants such as KOH and TMAH. The undercut performance observed is larger than that of SiN when etched in KOH, but when alternative alkaline etchants such as TMAH are used, the undercut is identical (1-2% with respect to etch depth). Various factors, such as primer bake, topcoat final cure temperature, etchant concentration and substrate surface conditions, have all been shown to affect undercut results. An additional advantage of this new technology is that it can be easily reworked/removed by solvents, plasma etch, Nano-Strip R , Piranha and RCA cleaning solutions depending on where the removal takes place in the process.
In this study, we have developed a new set of cyan, magenta and yellow (CMY) dyed color filter materials to meet the need of digital photography applications. These new color filter materials consist of a dye, a photo sensitive polymer binder, photo initiators, and acrylic monomers in addition to safe solvents such as propylene glycol methyl ether (PGME) which allow deposition of thin film layers by standard spin-on coating techniques. CMY materials share many desirable properties with standard photoresists, e.g., excellent coating quality, thin film uniformity, and good adhesion to semiconductor substrates. They work as negative resists and are sensitive to i-line UV light with photo speed of 300 mJ/cm2 and below. We have shown, for example, that a 1im film exposed and developed will exhibit high-resolution feature sizes of 3im pixels and below, These CMY materials have excellent thermal and light stability and good color characteristics.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.