Beyond “Smart-Cut®” Recent Advances in Layer Transfer for Material Integration

Abstract

An integrated substrate, consisting of more than one material or material structure, is highly desirable for optimizing performance of multiple-device types on a single chip or for growing high-quality heteroepitaxial films on compliant substrates. A typical integrated substrate contains a stack of thin layers of similar or dissimilar materials that are either amorphous, or poly- or single-crystalline with a variety of lattice constants or crystallographic orientations. Partially or fully processed device layers can also be transferred onto a desired substrate where the transferred device layer can be further processed on the opposite side of its original surface. In this article, we focus on issues related to layer transfer for material integration.Layer transfer from a hydrogen (H)-implanted wafer onto a desired substrate by wafer bonding and layer splitting (the so-called “Smart-Cut®” method) is an attractive approach to prepare integrated materials, such as-silicon-on-insulator (SOI), SiC or GaAs on oxidized silicon, and Ge on glass.