The Carleton University MicroFabrication Facility (CUMFF) is a flexible facility for manufacturing silicon integrated circuits and devices in support of research on process technology, device physics and modelling, innovative circuit techniques, photonics, biomedical devices, and microelectromechanical systems (MEMS). The facility was opened in 1993 as part of the Minto Centre for Advanced Studies in Engineering, and is the result of decades of experimental research in semiconductor devices at Carleton.
A notable strength of the facility is in MOS processing: MOS gate dielectrics can be produced with contamination at industrially acceptable levels. Every year CUMFF is used in a quasi-production mode to fabricate a multiproject chip in 5 micron LOCOS-isolated polysilicon gate nMOS technology containing designs submitted as a coursework project by fourth-year students. These designs typically contain 50 to 100 transistors. Working chips are returned for testing within approximately three weeks of submission of CAD files, and wafer-level probing usually indicates yields of more than 80% for the circuits.
