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Project Information per year
2008 - 2007 - 2006 - 2005 - 2004
PROJECT III.1
POROUS SILICON TECHNOLOGY and APPLICATIONS
Project leader: Dr A. G. Nassiopoulou
Key Researchers: Dr A. G. Nassiopoulou and Dr H. Contopanagos
Post-doctoral scientist: Dr D. Pagonis, Dr D. Goustouridis (part time)
Phd students: F. Zacharatos, V. Gianneta
Collaborating researcher: Dr G. Kaltsas
Funding:
- EU Marie Curie/ ‘’RF on porous’’, re-integration grant, Contract N0 016142, 29/7/2005-28/7/2007
- Contract from the National Research Agency-Cyprus, Photothermal analysis, 1/7/2004-30/6/2006
- Contract with the company Unilever UK, Flow system for Unilever, 1/12/2005-31/5/2007
- Contract with the company ST Microelectronics SA France, RF-on-porous, 30/7/2005-30/7/2008
Research orientation:
- Material development (Nanoporous or macroporous silicon)
- Development of micromachining processes
- Application in flow sensors, accelerometers, microfluidic devices and on-chip integration of RF components.
a) Porous silicon technology for sensors
A big effort has been devoted the last years at IMEL in developing enabling processing technologies and materials for different applications including sensors and systems. One such technology with important potential for applications is porous silicon technology.
Porous silicon is a nanostructured material which may be formed locally on a silicon substrate by electrochemistry. It presents high thermal and electrical resistivity and it may be used as a micro-hotplate material in silicon thermal sensors. In addition, porous silicon shows etching selectivity compared to bulk silicon and it is a very good sacrificial material for bulk silicon micro-machining.
Important expertise and know how on porous silicon have been developed at IMEL within different EU and national projects, as well as within direct contracts with industry, including:
- Proprietary micromachining techniques based on the use of porous silicon as a sacrificial layer for the fabrication of free standing silicon membranes, bridges and cantilevers on silicon
- Technologies using porous silicon for local thermal isolation on a silicon wafer, for RF isolation or as a matrix for the deposition of catalytic materials for chemical sensors
b) RF integration on porous silicon
This activity started at IMEL in 2004 with the overall objective:
- to explore and extend porous silicon technology into the domain of CMOS-compatible integrated RF systems for use in systems-on-chip and
- to improve the performance of currently integrated analog CMOS components by above technology transfer and related optimization of design methodologies.
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Research
