Room-temperature bonded silicon on insulator wafers with a dense buried oxide layer formed by annealing a deposited silicon oxidation layer and surface-activated bonding

Abstract

We propose a fabrication process for a silicon on insulator (SOI) wafer with an extremely thick buried oxide (BOX) layer for custom micro-electro mechanical systems (MEMS) devices. A BOX layer is generally formed by thermal oxidation above 800 °C. It is limited for this method to form an extremely thick layer of more than 10 μm. Thus, we attempted to deposit the BOX layer by chemical vapor deposition at 300 °C for a short time, followed by annealing at above 300 °C to make it denser. In addition, a silicon layer was bonded to the BOX layer at room temperature by surface activated bonding not to receive thermal stress. As a result, the bonding interface had no voids. The breakdown electric field of the BOX layer in the accidental B mode was improved by annealing. Therefore, SOI wafers fabricated by our method will be beneficial to next-generation MEMS device fabrication.