By Izentis LLC
Izentis has developed precision mounting posts, or ThermoYield actuators, for MIT. The posts are nano-adjustable set-and-forget optical mounts used for alignment. While heating the posts between two mirrors, a constant force can compress the post until the mirrors are perfectly aligned. The target application of ThermoYield actuators is the precision alignment and mounting of thin-shell x-ray mirrors.
Izentis designs and sells custom tools for bonding silicon and other MEMS substrates to carrier wafers. The main purpose of these tools is to temporarily bond wafers that have been diced into chipsonto whole wafers for subsequent processing. Many tools, and in particular etching tools, require complete wafers to process. In a research environment wafers often need to be cleaved for inspection or other purposes, which makes further processing steps difficult. We have developed a bonding tool to create high quality bonds in a vacuum. We use crystalbond 555, a wax with a melting point around 54 degrees C, to bond chips to carriers. We have found that bonding the wafers on a hot plate at ambient pressure leaves voids, which can be detrimental when using a reactive-ion etcher. A vacuum bond significantly reduces the voids since all the voids are compressed when the bond is placed at ambient pressure. The resulting bonds lead to significantly higher quality etches. The vacuum bonder is a vacuum chamber with a precision hot plate inside, and a claw to hold the sample. The carrier wafer is placed on the hot plate, and crytalbond is applied and melted. The chip is then held above the carrier by the claw while the chamber is pumped down to around 700 mTorr. Once at the desired pressure, the sample can then be pressed onto the carrier and bonded. After the bond the carrier and sample can be removed from the chamber, and the crytalbond will solidify completing the bonding process. We can design a variety of different vacuum chambers, with hot plates and claws for different size wafers. The vacuum bonder shown here is 18 inches in diameter, and the claw is designed for chips up to 4 inches. Please contact us for more information and quotes on vacuum bonders.
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Izentis offers gratings that utilize reflection from periodic surfaces, known as a reflection gratings. If the surfaces are flat, reflection gratings are similar to phase transmission gratings. Specifically much of the light is in the zeroth order. The key break-through for reflection gratings is to reflect the light on angled mirrors (often called grating facets) such that the diffraction orders coincide with the specular reflection angle. This effect is knows as blazing and it can significantly increase efficiency since the majority of the light is directed into a small number of non-zero diffraction orders. The angle α has to be designed such that the optical path length difference for two rays, that specularly reflect one period apart, is an integer multiple of the wavelength. Izentis LLC offers custom reflection gratings with facet angles ranging from 0.5 to 30 degrees, with pitches as low as 200 nm. The grating dimensions can be as large as 60 mm on a side. Please contact us for more information and quotes on reflection gratings.
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