SOI thickness uniformity improvement using wafer-scale corrective etching for silicon nano-photonic device

Spectral response of high-index contrast silicon nano-photonic devices are very sensitive to small dimensional variations. The change in the device dimension is mainly caused by thickness/height and width of the device. While the later can be controlled by using high resolution patterning technology, such as e-beam lithography or advanced optical lithography. However, thickness or height of the device is largely dictated by the wafer manufacturing process. In this paper, we present our recent work on thickness nonuniformity improvement using Gas Cluster Ion Beam-Location Specific Processing where the thickness non-uniformity over a 200 mm is reduced by 50% by using this process.