Fabrication of Tapered Doped-silicon Micropillars

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is seeking information on commercial vendors that can provide fabricated arrays of tapered/conical doped-silicon micro-pillars on silicon wafer substrates. The reference materials will be most useful to analysts if provided as sharpened micro-pillar arrays that can be directly analyzed in the atom probe instrument. The key requirements for the vendor include: • Being able to work with either 100 mm or 150 mm silicon wafer starting materials • Being able to fabricate arrays of tapered/conical doped-silicon micro-pillars from the silicon wafer starting materials • Being able to fabricate additional features on the micro-pillar array coupons, such as plateaus, to permit analysts to perform complementary analyses using other materials characterization techniques • Being able to dice the fabricated micro-pillar arrays into coupons with rough dimensions 10 millimeters by 5 millimeters • Being able to work with small lot sizes for processing and fabrication