SBIR-STTR Award

Summit Information Solutions, Inc. (Summit) proposes to use a mature thin film deposition technology, widely adopted by the microelectronics industry, to deposit pinhole-free thin films of copper and silver metal (< 10nm) onto oxide substrates. While there has been some success with using this thin film deposition technique to deposit these films onto metal substrates, a viable, repeatable methodology for oxide substrates has not been widely demonstrated. For this feasibility study, Summit, in partnership with The University of Alabama in Huntsville, will explore several deposition chemistries to demonstrate the feasibility of copper and silver on planar oxides. In the course of the study, the metallic thin films will be characterized for optical transmittance, sheet conductivity, and film thickness. In addition to these measurements, other techniques will be employed to ensure that the chemical composition of the copper and silver thin films achieve the solicitation's goals.

Deposition of highly conductive, continuous thin film metals has proven to be a significant challenge. There are several techniques that allow deposition of these metals, but their application is limited to planar surfaces and only offer complete line of sight deposition. During a recent Phase I STTR project, Summit Information Solutions, Inc. (Summit), in partnership with University of Alabama in Huntsville, demonstrated the capability to deposit sub 10 nm, continuous thin films of silver across silicon substrates with native oxide. Based on this success the Summit team will take this new capability and explore the possibility of depositing these silver thin films in a binary dielectric stack configuration using several different oxide materials. The team will determine the efficacy of depositing silver onto these optical oxides and depositing these oxides onto the silver thin films. Once the deposition characteristics are understood, the team will deposit these binary stacks with varying thickness of each layer to further explore the optical properties available with this technique. At the end of this project the Summit team will provide a new powerful process to the DoD that will allow for the development of optical stacks on arbitrarily complex 3D optical lenses.