Microfabrication at LMF

I am really curious about the simple techniques that are  reproducible and that can make life easier. Transparent conductive oxide coatings, especially ITO (indium tin oxide), are being used in many application areas such as solar cells, electrochromic windows and display devices. A grand majority requires micron sized patterned electrodes. Since I am working on a project that needs ITO electrodes in the micron range we applied for a Canadian Microelectronics Corporation Microsystems Micro-Nano Technology (CMC-MNT) financial assistance and got a good amount of support for the developement of a procedure by wet chemical etching. I prefered wet chemical etching instead of reactive ion etching because of the simplicity of the technique and the availability of the materials in every chemistry laboratory.

Lucikly, after making some litearture review on the subject I found some information on the etching process. Most results were not comparable although they claim to use the same etchants, but this is not very surprising to me because the deposition technique and the post-treatment processes of diferent ITO manufacturers are not the same. We will be publisihing the results as a part of a bigger project on electrolyte gating very soon.

at LMF, École Polytechnique de Montréal 2012