| As the length scales of integrated circuit (IC) devices continue to decrease, it is becoming increasingly important to prepare extremely clean, atomically smooth silicon surfaces. A better understanding of the chemistry of wet silicon processing is essential to minimize surface roughness and contamination.;Combined with infrared spectroscopy, the deuterium labeling allows us to follow silicon etching in aqueous solutions, and thus we can probe surface stability under various conditions, such as pH, fluoride composition, O;A novel reaction of Co;The second part of this dissertation studies adhesion of polymer films to oxidized silicon surfaces. Our motivation is to correlate the strength of the adhesion to the coverage of the active functional group using the well-defined self-assembled monolayers as model adhesion promoters. Monolayers terminated by the -SH functional group, which can participate in free radical polymerization of overlying acrylate polymers, were used. A highly reproducible experimental setup was built to measure the adhesion energy. |
