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A French Technology Transfer Office offers new technology for improving the precision of nanofabrication tools

Country of Origin: France
Reference Number: TOFR20171121002
Publication Date: 28 March 2018

Summary

A French Technology Office (TTO) offers technology to improve the precision of the nanofabrication tools, in order to reach picometer instead of nanometer precision nowadays (one thousand times smaller).
This improved precision could be implemented in telecommunication or in optical applications using semiconductors.
This TTO is looking for a company which could be interested in acquiring and industrializing the technology with a licence agreement or a technical cooperation agreement.

Description

The French TTO (Technology Transfer Office) is acting on behalf of an established public laboratory in the Paris region. 

The R&D for increasingly miniaturised electronic systems involves the invention of new technologies able to meet these challenges. Electronic components are based on more and more complex supports (or wafers or layers of silicon) and in order to carry out these on the nanometric scale, several methods exist such as lithography or etching.
This technique (of low Technology Readiness Level (TRL)) contributes to plan electronics chips (semiconductors) as transmitters of optical signals.
The laboratory has developed technology which allows to improve the precision of these nanometric techniques by scratching the surface of materials thanks to a beam of light.
The innovation consists in a high precision finishing process for fine-tuning nanometric photonic structures in various types of semiconductors.The process leads to high precision spectral alignment of the optical features in these resonating structure arrays.

The patented process allows to precisely etch (at the picometer scale) one or several photonic resonators by accurately tuning their resonance wavelength.

The precisely tuned / etched nanoresonators obtained thanks to the technology can be used in:
- telecom / datacom : optical routing and multiplexing, semiconductor lasers
- optical sensors : gas sensing, optical gyroscopes
For the gas sensing, this kind of technology allows to distinguish two very close molecules for example and also detects traces of gas.
Anticipating the miniaturization of datacom devices using silicon photonics, such precision will become mandatory.

The French TTO is looking for a partner using the presented technology through license agreement. In addition, the French TTO is looking for a technical partner who could be interested in participating in a project for further developing the technology (transposition of the process to other types of semiconductors, etc.)

Advantages and Innovations

Currently no solution available on the market allows to reach picometer precision for the nanofabrication tools which could be an issue for optical applications such as metrology.
The developed innovation answers the above-mentioned limits.

The technology is simple to implement and robust as it only requires basic equipment (tunable telecom laser, etc…) and consumables (ionic liquids or gases, even water…)
The whole process takes a few minutes for a complete spectral alignment of a classical process misalignment distribution, scalable process. It requires:
-no vacuum,
-no cryogenic conditions,
-no complex environment.

The main interest for the potential partner is to implement easily a finishing step in his manufacturing process allowing to reach unprecedented precision in terms of dimensional homogeneity and spectral tuning.
This technology is useful for the industrial development of miniaturized photonic devices for datacenters and for optical sensors using silicon photonics.

Stage Of Development

Under development/lab tested

Stage Of Development Comment

The process has been tested on two types of semiconductors (Silicium (Si) and  Aluminium, Gallium, Arsenic (AlGaAs)) and with several ionic agents (liquids and gases) at lab scale
A demonstration of the spectral alignment has been realized on ten nanoresonators

Requested partner

The TTO is interested in a license agreement or a technical cooperation agreement for acquiring and industrializing the technology.
The partner sought will be a university or a lab with competences in silicon photonics. Preferably the partner could be a company such as a tool manufacturing and/or a foundry acting in semi-conductors or datacom industry.
The time to market this new technology could be long.
That is the reason why the partner should have a clear industrial application in mind, and should have a strong technical background to co-develop the product with the laboratory.

Cooperation offer is closed for requests