OE-10.5 VLSI Technology & Fabrication Process
You can describe wafer preparation and crystal growth, and explain oxidation, CVD, lithography, etching, ion implantation and diffusion as steps in producing IC layers.
This unit answers the question the rest of the course assumes: how do the layers you drew actually come to exist in silicon. Photolithography is the step that sets the minimum feature size and therefore Moore's law's pace - everything else in the industry follows from what the lithography can resolve. Ion implantation replaced diffusion for doping because it gives precise, controllable profiles, and knowing why is a compact example of a process improvement changing what designs are possible.
Work through these
Introduction to microelectronics and Moore's law
Where the industry came from and the observation that shaped its economics for fifty years. It is context, and it explains why every step below is about making things smaller.
Various layers of an IC
What is physically stacked to make a working circuit. It is the same vocabulary as the layout topic, now from the manufacturing side.
Wafer preparation and crystal growth
Where the silicon itself comes from, before any circuit exists. The purity requirements here are hard to believe until you see the numbers.
Oxidation
Growing an insulating layer, which is one of the reasons silicon rather than another semiconductor. It is a genuinely lucky property of the material.
Chemical vapour deposition (CVD)
Adding material from a gas, which is how most of the layers arrive. The variants differ in temperature and conformality.
Lithography
Printing the pattern, which is the step that sets the minimum feature size and most of the cost. When people say a process node, this is the step they mean.
Etching
Taking material away where it is not wanted, chemically or physically. The choice between the two is about how vertical the resulting walls need to be.
Ion implantation
Firing dopant atoms in, which gives precise control of how many and how deep. It replaced the older method in the next item for exactly that reason.
Diffusion techniques
The older way of introducing dopant, driven by heat. Still used, and the comparison with implantation closes the topic.
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