• Literature Review
o Comprehensive literature review of Bosch Process principles, critical parameters and their influence on full wafer uniformity.
o Comprehensive literature review on BMD (oxygen precipitates, vacancy/interstitial mechanisms) and known defect interactions during the Bosch DRIE process.
o Overview of recent trends and research interests in Bosch-process technologies.

• Experimental Work and Analysis
o Characterization of the current state of selected production equipment in regards of Silicon etch rate uniformity, deposition o Characterization of the current state of selected DRIE production equipment in regards of Silicon etch rate uniformity, deposition uniformity, breakthrough-etch uniformity and overall Bosch-process etch rate uniformity on full-wafer-uniformity basis.
o Characterization of Silicon etch rate uniformity, deposition uniformity, breakthrough-etch uniformity as a function of TSV depth.
o Characterization of starting wafer material: identification of type, size, density, and radial distribution of BMDs using LST/FTIR as the primary method, with TEM/FIB-SEM verification on selected sites.
o Probing the individual Bosch-Process steps for robustness and optimization of uniformity in a Design of Experiment setting.
o Set-up of an optimized Bosch process sequence with improved full wafer uniformity.

Objectives
o Identify the main factors responsible for non-uniformity effects close to the wafer edge.
o Determine type, size, density, and variation of BMDs in our starting material.
o Provide a model for predicting cycle-by-cycle progression of non-uniformity in regards of full-wafer uniformity and TSV depth.
o Develop a characterization procedure for full-wafer uniformity which allows to correlate electrical parameters to tool parameters.