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The NanoGrowth™ Catalyst Carbon Nanotube growth tool

NanoGrowth Catalyst is Surrey NanoSystems' high-end tool for Carbon Nanotube research, development and production, and includes all of the capabilities of NanoGrowth 1000n, with the addition of built-in wafer transport and a uniquely-flexible physical vapour deposition (PVD) catalyst generation. NanoGrowth Catalyst provides extremely versatile and proven tool for growing carbon nanotube and nanowire materials with great precision and repeatability, with the benefit of integrated catalyst generation and wafer/substrate transport automation for optimum speed of operation in either development or production environments.

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 Catalyst 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 built-in PVD catalyst generation system greatly enhances both the speed of Carbon Nanotube growth cycles, as well as the tool's versatility.  Dual sources allow metal or other catalysts to be laid down in stages; these can be employed to deposit barrier and active layers for example, or to create alloys. An optional nanoparticle deposition source module, with a programmable filter, extends this versatility, allowing nanoparticle clusters of specific sizes to be deposited uniformly.  Programmable control of the tool allows great control over the arrival energy of the particles, supporting deposition or implantation for example. (Note that there is also a sublimation vapour catalysts delivery option available for metallic catalysts - see below).  Proven carbon nanotube catalyst delivery recipes are included.

A wide range of expansion options (see below) provides further 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 applications, and is highly modular allowing users to expand the tool in many ways, including:

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

• Sputter ion etch - providing integrated etching capability
• Sublimation vapour catalyst delivery - allowing this single tool to introduce vapour phase catalysts such as ferrocene

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.)