Batch Fabrication of Wear-Resistant and Conductive Probe with PtSi Tip

Meijie Liu; Yinfang Zhu; Junyuan Zhao; Lihao Wang; Jinling Yang; Fuhua Yang

doi:10.3390/mi12111326

Batch Fabrication of Wear-Resistant and Conductive Probe with PtSi Tip

Micromachines (Basel). 2021 Oct 28;12(11):1326. doi: 10.3390/mi12111326.

Authors

Meijie Liu^{1

2

3}, Yinfang Zhu^{1

2

3}, Junyuan Zhao^{1

2

3}, Lihao Wang^{1

2

3}, Jinling Yang^{1

2

3}, Fuhua Yang^{1

2}

Affiliations

¹ Institute of Semiconductors, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100083, China.
² College of Materials Science and Opto-Electronic Technology, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, China.
³ State Key Laboratory of Transducer Technology, Shanghai 200050, China.

Abstract

This paper presents a simple and reliable routine for batch fabrication of wear-resistant and conductive probe with a PtSi tip. The fabrication process is based on inductively coupled plasma (ICP) etching, metal evaporation, and annealing. Si tips with curvature radii less than 10 nm were produced with good wafer-level uniformity using isotropic etching and thermal oxygen sharpening. The surface roughness of the etched tip post was reduced by optimized isotropic etching. The dependence of the platinum silicide morphology on annealing conditions were also systematically investigated, and conductive and wear-resistant probes with PtSi tips of curvature radii less than 30 nm were batch fabricated and applied for scanning piezoelectric samples.

Keywords: ICP isotropic etching; PtSi tip; annealing; wear-resistant.

Abstract

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