Award Data

We propose a hand-held device that would be capable of measuring particles as small as 20 nm in liquid batches from semiconductor fabrication. The proposed system will overcome the complexities of existing in-line and batch sampling techniques and thus would reduce the operating time and cost of the fabrication process. The device will be small and easily portable and will not come in direct cont ...

Semiconductor processing technology continuously advances to package greater capability into smaller footprints, leading to nanometer feature sizes. Increasingly, nanometer scale impurities can cause fatal circuit flaws. Consequently it is important to monitor semiconductor processing solvents for particle impurities in the 20 nm to 10 micron range. Existing liquid particle detectors function wel ...

There is a lack of in-situ, non-contact, non-destructive techniques to detect the presence of particulates contaminating bulk liquid samples in clean room environment during semiconductor processing.  Leveraging our extensive experience building optical sensor systems, we will design and build an innovative handheld particle counter using diffusive wave spectroscopy. Our handheld system can be u ...

The trend of microelectronic processing technology is for more advanced complex devices integrated in smaller size. Particles could become significantly more  prevalent as killer defects and have adverse effect on fabrication yield rate. Meanwhile, clean environment control requirements originally focused on particles in the air have been extended to encompass liquids that come into direct conta ...

To meet the demands of the DMEA182-002 SBIR solicitation (“Front End of Line and Back End of Line Layer Fabrication Partitioning for the Purpose of Design Intellectual Property Protection”), the MaXentric and UCLA team proposes the HIGHFIVE (Heterogeneous Integration Guideline Highlighting Fabrication of Information Veiled Electronics), which provides a practical verification flow using the c ...

Alphacore proposes Dr. Yago Gonzalez-Velo as the principal investigator (PI) for this SBIR program. Dr. Gonzalez-Velo has experience ranging from radiation effects, characterization to implementation of novel technologies in the BEOL of CMOS circuits. Dr Gonzalez Velo has gained experience in BEOL layer design, as well as photolithography mask design, and MEMS manufacturing experience through dif ...

A single IC manufacturer may use their detailed knowledge of a DoD ASIC IP to the detriment of the United States’ national interests. DoD program offices are not allowed to make use of the vast majority of manufacturing organizations worldwide, and are limited to a small number of DoD accredited “Trusted Suppliers”. This requirement generally drives up manufacturing costs, in that, ITAR com ...

FPGA units in security-sensitive applications need secure manufacturing & configuration methods to combat supply chain interdiction and compromise by adversaries, with robust Third-Party IP provenance traceability. The proposed solution uniquely meets this need with a State of the Art blockchain implementation to build a fit-for-purpose supply chain blockchain (SCBC) optimized for DMEA’s FPGA  ...

ASIC and FPGA design and manufacturing companies are globally distributed. As a result, third party IP designs sent to offshore to untrusted fabs for manufacture are vulnerable to security threats such as cloning, over-building and reverse engineering. There is a growing need to enhance the security of the ASIC and FPGA supply chain. The blockchain technology which is primarily used in cryptocurr ...

The proposed research and technical objectives in this project deal with computerized automatic delayering and polishing system that would be applicable to both commercial and government semiconductor device research and development with applications including Failure Analysis (FA), Fault Isolation (FI), and Reverse Engineering (RE) of semiconductor microelectronic devices. This project could hel ...