Activity Report 2010 - CNRS

9 – TECHNOLOGICAL
FACILITIES
Created at the early stage of the
Nanosciences Foundation in 2006, the
“network of technological facilities”
gathers most of the facilities concerned
by nanofabrication, characterization at
nanoscale, simulation and modeling of
nanostructures, within the scientific area
covered by the Foundation. The network
is aimed to coordinate the financial
support provided by the Foundation to
the facilities. By supporting running costs
of some facilities, the Foundation also
eases the access to shared equipments.
With almost 1/3 of its budget dedicated
to the network of technological facilities,
the Foundation contributes efficiently to
the development of nanotechnologies
involving physics, chemistry and biology.
The facilities are opened to the whole
community of researchers, post doctoral
fellows and students involved in
nanosciences. They offer state-of-the-art
equipments for nanofabrication,
nanocharacterisation and numerical
simulation. More than 80% of the overall
projects supported by the Foundation
uses or have used the equipments of the
network and many other national and
European projects also benefits from
them.
THE NETWORK
The network is composed by four
facilities dedicated to:
Nanofabrication
Nanocharacterization
Nano-chemistry and biology
Numerical simulation
The Nanofabrication Facility
This Nanofabrication facility covers 1000
m 2 dispatched over two clean rooms
located in close proximity. These clean
rooms offer top level equipments for
optical and electron beam lithography,
metals and oxides deposition, reactive
ion etching, chemical cleaning and
etching, characterization and metrology.
They are specially equipped to process
samples of various sizes (from millimetre
up to 4 inches). Special procedures have
been implemented to avoid cross
contamination as different types of
materials (semiconductors, metals and
polymers) can be processed in the
facility. This flexibility is particularly
important to provide a full access to the
networks members.
PTA:
The Plateforme Technologique Amont
(PTA) operated by CEA, CNRS, Grenoble
INP and UJF and located on the MINATEC
campus, provides to the community upto-date
equipments for nanofabrication
including electron beam lithography,
etching (ion beams, reactive plasma) and
deposition. The main topics developed in
the PTA deal with nanoelectronics,
spintronics, and photonics. Since 2009
and thanks to the merger of PTA and
CIME Nanotech clean rooms, the PTA
provides also equipments dedicated to
the fabrication of Micro-Electro
Mechanical Systems (MEMS).
Fig. 1: Elliptical GaAs photonic etched
nanowires for shape-controlled single mode
photon emission. [Coll. LETI-INAC & PTA and
Nitin MALIK, a PhD student employed by the
Foundation as part of the 2007 “new comers”
project of Julien CLAUDON.]
The Foundation provides funding to the
PTA for both equipments and running
costs. In 2009, the Foundation co-funded
the purchase of a LPCVD equipment
dedicated to polysilicon and silicon nitride
deposition for an amount of 220k€. In
2010, the Foundation contributed to the
acquisition of a second electron beam
evaporator for metal thin film deposition
for an amount of 300k€. This second
equipment will solve the bottle neck
created by the overbooking of the
existing evaporator. On the other hand,
the Foundation contribution to the
running costs in 2009 (250k€) and 2010
(200k€) allowed to keep a constant cost
for the PTA users in spite of the increase
of the PTA running costs due partly to the
merger with the CIME Nanotech facilities.
Thanks to the Foundation funding, the
PTA presently provides a fully operational
nanofabrication facility, largely accessible
to the nanotechnology and nanosciences
community.
The PTA activity has been constantly
growing since its opening, especially for
the last two years.
CONTACTS
François LEFLOCH
francois.lefloch@cea.fr
Tel: +33 4 38 78 48 22
Cécile GOURGON
cecile.gourgon@cea.fr
Tel: +33 4 38 78 98 37
37
SCIENTIFIC REPORT