Lab course semiconductor technology

The current crisis in chip supply proves the need for well-educated engineers in the field of semiconductor technology in Europe. In this lab course, you will - probably for the first time - get in touch with many important processing techniques for the fabrication of semiconductor devices and even though the transistors you will be fabricating will not be leading-edge technology, the concepts you will learn in this lab course are still up to date. Since the fabrication of chips is a highly automated process nowadays, a lab course, where you can conduct many steps on your own and by hand helps you for example to understand what is happening between the moment when you send a chip design to a manufacturer (tape-out) and when you receive the manufactured chips several months later.

In this lab course, you will fabricate Metall-Semiconductor Field Effect Transistors (MESFETs) starting from a GaAs-Wafer with a thin n-channel. You will conduct every step needed to end up with devices which you then electrically characterized. Some of these steps are:

• Wet-chemical wafer cleaning
• Deposition of metals (both electon-beam and thermal)
• Photolithography
• Wet-etching
• Lift-off
• Thermal annealing
• Optical microscopy
• Stylus profilometry
• Electrical characterization of Schottky diodes and MESFETs with a microprober

Because it is helpful to conduct the different steps of semiconductor device fabriacation in a sequence without longer interruptions, this lab course will be held as a one week laboratory course in the semester holidays. The dates will be planned using Moodle, so please register for the Moodle-course if you want to participate! Additionally to the week in the cleanroom and lab, this course requires a careful perparation as well as writing a detailed report afterwards. You will usually receive the manual one week before the lab starts.