High-yield Fabrication of AFM Probes with

Simultaneous Formation of Both Nano-tips and

Cantilever
Jianqiang Han, Xinxin Li*, Haifei Bao, Yuelin Wang, Bin Liu, Xiaohong Ge
State Key Lab of Transducer Technology
Shanghai Institute of Microsystem and Information Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences
Shanghai 200050, China
*
e-mail: xxli@mail.sim.ac.cn
AbstractPresented is a new micromachining technology
for high-yield fabrication of silicon AFM probes. Both
tips and cantilevers are simultaneously formed with a
masked-maskless-combined anisotropic etching process.
The cantilever contour is firstly formed by masked
etching. Then, the SiO2 etching mask is removed while
the mask for tip-contour formation is remained.
Following the combined etching is performed with the
cantilever dived to the bottom of the SOI active layer by
maskless etching. Simultaneously, cone-shaped tip
contour with about 0.5m top-diameter is formed by
convex-corner undercutting of masked etching process.
By specific design based on the rules of the maskedmaskless combined etching, the cantilevers and the tips
are simultaneously formed. Compared with previous tipto-cantilever sequential fabrication scheme, this
simultaneous formation can effectively increase
fabrication yield by avoiding the tips damaged during
the process. In addition, the low-cost and massproducible fabrication techniques, such as anisotropic
etching and thermal oxidization, are used instead of
expensive and difficult-controlled technique such as the
combination of anisotropic and isotropic RIE, etc.
Higher than 80% fabrication yield for the AFM probes
has been realized in 4-inch wafers. The final tips after
oxidation-sharpening treatment are generally with a
radius of about 10-30nm and the cantilever spring
constant can be well controlled. Sample scanning results
from the AFM probes are demonstrated to provide highresolution image, whose quality is comparable with those
from commercialized probes.

I.

the sample surface and transfers the interactive force

between the tip and the sample into deflection of the
cantilever that is photo-electronic detected and displayed as
an image. More often than not, optical bending sensing
scheme is used in commercial AFMs. The probes used in
this kind of application can be produced by either aperturemolding technology or directly etching process [1].
For the former method, inverse-pyramid-shaped cavity
with a nanometric hole at the bottom is formed firstly by
etching into silicon substrate, and then, filled with a thinfilm. The probes are finally released by dissolving the
silicon wafer mould [2]. This method is frequently used for
fabricating silicon nitride or metal probes, which generally
used in contact AFM mode. As the relatively low spring
constant of the filled thin-film and the not very sharp tipangle, this kind of probes are not very suitable for taping
mode applications.
For the latter method, the probes are formed directly by
anisotropic wet etching or reactive ion etching (RIE) [3,1].
Along with etching downwards, lateral convex-corner
undercutting or isotropic dry etching can help to form the
three-dimensional tip shape. This method is usually used for
fabricating silicon probes, which can be used in both contact
AFM mode and non-contact/tapping mode. More often than
not, this kind of probes are made of single crystalline silicon.
If RIE is involved for the formation of the silicon probes, the
process parameters should be precisely controlled to keep the
tip shape uniform. Besides that RIE process is not very low
cost, the process control is difficult. Anisotropic wet etching,
however, is a low cost mass fabrication method. The formed
shape is generally determined by disparity in etching rate
among different orientations. The fabrication is simple and
easily implemented without expensive equipments involved.
Normally the tip contour is firstly formed that can be further
sharpened by following oxidation [4]. With the formed tipcontour, the cantilever is finally formed by wet or dry
etching. During the process for the cantilevers, e.g.
photolithographic steps, the formed tips are easily touched
and damaged. This have been causing a fabrication-yield

INTRODUCTION

During the last decade atomic force microscopy (AFM)

has become a widespread and indispensable tool for highly
resolved image and investigation of micro- and nanosurface. One of the most important components in an AFM
is a flexible force-sensing cantilever with a nano-metric
sharp tip at the apex for sample probing. The tip scans over
0-7803-9056-3/05/$20.00 2005 IEEE.

223

problem that in turn influences the probe cost. In this paper

we present a novel method to fabricate AFM probes with
anisotropic wet etch. Different from the former works like in
Ref. 3, the tip and the cantilever are simultaneously formed
by a masked-maskless combined etching method. By using
the low-cost process, AFM probes are formed with a high
fabrication-yield and satisfactory surface imaging quality.
II.

precursory contour should be with the step-height slightly

higher than the designed cantilever thickness. In contrast,
the width should be quite larger than the final cantilever
width. Significant geometric evolution at the step-sidewall
will occurs during the maskless etching. The evolution at
the cross section of the cantilever is schematically shown in
Fig.2. The broken lines of ABCD represent the cross section
of a cantilever precursor by previously masked etching with
the height as h. Their sidewalls of AB and CD occupy (111)
crystal plane. With the SiO2 mask at the step top stripped,
following maskless etching will expose (311) fast-rate
etching plane at the upper edge of the step. Along with the
etching downwards, the etching for (311) plane will
undercut the previous (111) sidewalls up to replacing the
sidewall by (311) plane. During the maskless etching, the
step height is remained no change. However, the sidewall
replacement will change the cantilever cross section
including the width, as shown in Fig. 2 by the broken lines
of ABCD. The angle between the (311) plane and the
(100) plane is =25.24o. During the maskless etching, the
upper edge of the step will recess from B to B. The lateral
recession of the edge is [6]

FABRICATION

The Fabrication is in (100) 4-inch BE-SOI (Bonding and

etching-back silicon on insulator) wafers. The process
details are described as follow.
A. Silicon tip formation by masked etching in KOH
For AFM probing, the tip is a very crucial part in getting
a well resolved true picture of the sample surface. Here the
silicon tip is KOH etched by convex-corner undercutting
with a circular SiO2 mask. Starting with a photolithographic
steps, thermally grown oxide layer is patterned to form a
circular mask. Defined by the etching mask, the tip contour
is formed by convex-corner undercutting that is from the
surrounding of the mask [5]. By proper design for the mask
radius, the top diameter of the cone-shaped tip-contour can
be shrunk to 0.5~0.7m, while the cone height gets the tip
height requirement by simultaneous etching downwards. For
a desired tip height, the cone should be about 1-2m higher.
Fig. 1 shows a formed tip-cone etched by 40% aqueous
KOH. Since the masks are circular, the apex of the tip
contour is octagon-shaped that is formed by 8 fast-rate
etching facets.

BB ' = (2 .3452 r3 2 .1213 )d

where d is the maskless etching depth to (001) plane, r3 the
ratio of etching rate between (311) and (100) planes, i.e.,
r3=r(311)/r(100). For 40% aqueous KOH, the value of r3 is
1.715 [6]. Following this maskless etching geometric
evolution rule, the cantilever precursor should be
appropriately designed. When the maskless etching touches
the buried SiO2 layer of the SOI wafers, The desired
cantilever width, which is relevant to the spring constant of
the cantilever, should be obtained.
B

(111)

h
D

B
A

311

C
D

Figure 1. SEM image of a formed tip contour.

Figure 2. Cross-sectional evolution of the cantilever during maskless etching
is schematically scletched.

B. Cantilever formation by maskless etching

The cantilever is shaped by maskless etching from its
precursory contour that is previously formed by masked
etching. This maskless etching is processed simultaneously
together with the tip-contour formation. In other words, the
cantilever precursor is formed at first under a layer of
patterned SiO2 mask. Then the SiO2 mask is only remained
for the tip area with the SiO2 at other regions removed by
wet HF. This is completed by photolithography. Then the
masked etching for the tip and the maskless etching for the
cantilever are processed simultaneously. The cantilever

C. Silicon tip formation by masked etching in KOH

The micro-fabrication process sequence of the AFM
probes is shown with the cross-sectional steps in Fig. 3. The
process starts in SOI wafers with 12m-thick active layer,
1m-thick buried dioxide layer and 380m-thick base
substrate. The main process flow is as follows.
1. Silicon dioxide layer of 0.2m-thick is thermally
grown on both sides of the wafer at 1100C. Openings are

224

buried oxide layer of the SOI wafer is exposed and, then,

removed by 49% HF. As the etching rate of TMAH to SiO2
is negligibly low, the previous grown thermal oxide layer at
the front-side can safely protect the cantilevers and the tips
from backside etching. After the front-side oxide layer
removed, the front side of the cantilever is sputtered with
10-20nm-thick tungsten film for enhanced tip wear
endurability and better electric conductivity. The back
surface of the cantilever is the initial polished surface of one
wafer for the bonded SOI that is enough for optical bending
deflection during AFM applications.
Fig. 4 (a) shows a fabricated probe with close-up view of
the nano-tip in Fig. 4 (b). The height of fabricated tips is
around 8.5m. The curvature radius of the most probes is
around 10-30nm. Different thickness of the cantilevers can
be designed and fabricated for series of spring constant. The
spring constant can be controllably in the range of 0.05N/m
to 40N/m. The fabrication tolerance for the thickness is
0.2m. By now, 4-inch fabrication yield is slightly higher
than 80%.

patterned on the wafer backside for following cantilever

release etching.

2.

1.

3.

4.

6.

5.
Si

SiO2

Figure 3. Micro-fabrication process flow of the AFM probes.

2. The SiO2 at the front-side is patterned for the

cantilever precursory contour. Masked etching with 40%
KOH at 50oC is performed to shape the cantilever contour
that is along <110> direction. The contour width is 72m
with the etching depth as 4m, which is slightly larger than
the designed thickness of cantilevers.
3. Circular-shaped SiO2 mask is patterned near the
cantilever apex for the tip contour. The diameter of the
mask pattern is 29m. The distance between the end of the
cantilever contour and the circular center of the mask is
21m. By now the SiO2 at the top of the cantilever contours
is removed for following maskless etching.
4. The tips are masked etched by convex-corner
undercutting with 40% KOH solution. Mean while, the
cantilevers are under maskless etching. When the etching
touches the buried dioxide layer, slightly over etch is
processed that provides a tolerance for process control.
When the cantilever thickness and width get the designed
value, the diameter of the tip upper apex should be within
0.1-0.8m.
5. The remained SiO2 mask is removed. Low
temperature dry oxidization is performed to further
sharpening the tip contour into sharp tip with nano-metric
radius [4]. The oxide thickness is 450nm. The silicon
dioxide film in the openings on wafer backside is removed
by buffered HF, while the wafer front-side is protected with
spinning coated thick photoresistor.
6. Anisotropic etching with 25% aqueous TMAH at
80C is performed from the backside openings up to the
silicon substrate beneath the cantilevers removed. The

(a)

(b)

Figure 4. (a): SEM image of a formed AFM probe; (b): Close-up view
of the apex of the tip.

III.

CHARACTERIZATION

The probes are characterized by using the Ai-Jian-III type

AFM made by Shanghai Ai-Jian Nano-system Co. Ltd. The
testing includes contact mode, tapping mode and lateral
friction mode. The fabricated probes generally show
comparable imaging quality with commercial probes at hand.
Fig. 5 shows the compared contact-mode imaging results for
a nano-grating surface. The period and the height of the
grating are 500nm and 150nm, respectively.

(a)

225

(b)

supported by the Chinese Major State Basic Research

Development Program (2006CB300405).

Figure 5. Contact-mode imaging results for a nano-grating surface are

compared each other. (a): by commercial probe from Seiko Instrument; (b):
by our probe.

IV.

REFERENCES

CONCLUSIONS

[1]

We have fabricated AFM probes with KOH solution.

Probes and cantilevers are etched simultaneously by masked
and maskless etching, respectively. This fabrication method
has following advantages.
(i) This process is simple and low cost. There is no
expensive equipment involved in the fabrication.
(ii) The fabrication yield for 4-inch wafers is higher than
80%, thanks to the simultaneous formation of the tips and the
cantilevers.
(iii) A large range of spring constant of the probes can be
designed and formed with the techniques. The uniformity of
the cantilevers and the tips are satisfactory.
By implementing the probes in an atomic force
microscopy, the formed probes have been demonstrated to
provide high-resolution imaging of sample.

[2]

[3]

[4]
[5]

[6]

[7]

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

[8]

The authors are grateful to the NSFC project under the

contract numbers of 60376038. The research is also

226

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