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The NanoGrowth™ 1000n Carbon Nanotube growth tool

NanoGrowth 1000n is an extremely versatile and proven tool for growing carbon nanotube and nanowire materials with great precision and repeatability. Developed expressly for Carbon Nanotube applications, with ground-breaking research by the Advanced Technology Institute (ATI), and leading-edge plasma processing know-how from Surrey NanoSystems, the tool provides the research and development community with a highly practical Carbon Nanotube growth system, and comes with tested process recipes.

As standard, the NanoGrowth 1000n comes with both CVD (chemical vapour deposition) and PECVD (plasma-enhanced CVD) processing capability.  These two techniques provide great versatility for users, allowing material growth at 'standard' temperatures in and around the 500-1000 degrees C range, as well as growth at lower temperatures.  A wide range of expansion and catalyst options (see below) provides enormous versatility of material growth and applications for users.

In addition to being a designed-for-purpose Carbon Nanotube growth tool, Surrey NanoSystems has developed a control system and man-machine interface that allows users with limited knowledge of plasma based processing or CVD equipment to use the tool easily and effectively.  This attribute stems from NanoSoft™, a touch-screen SCADA (supervisory control and data acquisition) software interface. NanoSoft uses 'MIMIC' and other highly graphical displays of the tool to provide fine control over all stages of processing. Users are typically provided with ready-to-use processing programs, which provide recipe templates that may be adapted easily by users for their own applications. Users also have full manual control of the tool, and can create their own custom processes using a menu-driven user interface to control gas flow rates, voltage and current levels, RF power, temperatures, etc. Sophisticated datalogging, trending and batch tracking facilities help users to develop and document their own processes, to optimise recipes for commercial production. This software has been field proven on scientific thin-film tools for over six years, and is common to the complete NanoGrowth range.

Expansion options

The hardware architecture behind NanoGrowth benefits from many years of designing and manufacturing high-end thin film tools for development and production, and is highly modular, allowing users to expand the tool in many ways, including:

Internally-fitted modules (any or all can be fitted):

• Auto wafer transporter (load/lock) - automation to support high-throughput applications
• Sputter ion etch - providing integrated etching capability
• Sublimation vapour catalyst delivery - allowing this single tool to introduce vapour phase catalysts such as ferrocene (note that metal catalysts can be also be handled by NanoGrowth Catalyst)

Port-interfaced options (only one may be connected at any time):

• ICP (inductively coupled plasma) - a further plasma process providing another degree of flexibility over deposition
• PECVD for silicon materials - allowing this single tool to grow other materials (Si, SiO2, SiNx …)

(Note that users can install/remove/refit all options themselves, with the exception of wafer transport.)