The top cladding is an important factor when designing photonic devices. It has implications on waveguide properties such as mode guidance and optical loss. Silicon dioxide (SiO2) is a commonly used cladding material for photonic devices as it has low optical loss and also enables a large refractive index contrast between the waveguide core and cladding. We performed an investigation into the material properties of SiO2 thin films deposited by different methods, namely, plasma-enhanced chemical vapor deposition (PECVD) undoped silicate glass (USG), high density plasma (HDP), PECVD tetraethyl orthosilicate (TEOS), and low pressure chemical vapor deposition (LPCVD) TEOS. Material properties including refractive index, surface roughness, absorption, and film stress were characterized for the different SiO2 cladding samples. Our results show that the surface roughness of HDP films was around 55 times better than that of USG films. In terms of film stress however, USG films had the lowest, whereas PECVD TEOS films were found to have the highest film stress, more than twice of that of the USG films. These findings indicate that when deciding on a particular deposition method for the SiO2 cladding, besides considerations of thermal budget and device application, an equally important compromise needs to be made to give a balance among the various material properties.
In this paper we demonstrate the development and optimization of an 800 nm-thick Plasma-enhanced chemical vapor deposition (PECVD) silicon nitride (SiN) photonic platform on a 300-mm silicon wafer. The implementation of ArF immersion lithography contributes to superior manufacturing processes, as it provides excellent critical dimension (CD) uniformity inter- and intra-wafers, make it an optimal platform of production of integrated circuits and nanoscale devices.
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