Hi, Leo. I have some experience with Logitech PM5 polishing/lapping tool. I'm not sure about the price. It is single-wafer system, more like laboratory/R&D tool, not quite productive, so the price should not be so high. The choice to build the CMP tool yourself depends on your finishing roughness and sample thickness uniformity requirements. PM5 has very good control over the lapping flatness, and you would spend years trying to repeat what is already done by Logitech. If your samples are small and you don't need to remove lots of the hard material (like silicon), and your finishing/uniformity requirements are low, you can try to arrange the home-built system and then use commercially available slurries for CMP. The cheapest version for the first experiments would be the fixed glass plate constantly wetted by the slurry and your sample temporary bonded to the larger carrier (like 10x10 cm) moved by the hand over the glass plate in random translation/rotation manner. This method is slow and requires patience, however it would give you some understanding what you realy need. Cheers. Darius To: General MEMS discussion Subject: [mems-talk] Chemical Mechanical Polishing Dear MEMS community Our lab has been thinking about acquiring a chemical mechanical polishing tool. We are tight in budget so I'm wondering what would be an economical solution. Would it be possible for us to build one ourselves? What caveats do we need to look for if we are looking for a second-hand one? We are interested in planarizing photoresist (with plated metal) and silicon primarily. We typically process small pieces of samples (1in^2 or so) and seldom do full wafers. Many thanks. Leo -- Xiaoguang "Leo" Liu Assistant Professor Electrical and Computer Engineering, Davis MM-Wave Research Center University of California, Davis 3169 Kemper Hall, One Shields Avenue, Davis, CA, 95616 lxgliu@ucdavis.edu http://ucdart.net _______________________________________________ Hosted by the MEMS and Nanotechnology Exchange, the country's leading provider of MEMS and Nanotechnology design and fabrication services. Visit us at http://www.mems-exchange.org Want to advertise to this community? See http://www.memsnet.org To unsubscribe: http://mail.mems-exchange.org/mailman/listinfo/mems-talk _______________________________________________ Hosted by the MEMS and Nanotechnology Exchange, the country's leading provider of MEMS and Nanotechnology design and fabrication services. Visit us at http://www.mems-exchange.org Want to advertise to this community? See http://www.memsnet.org To unsubscribe: http://mail.mems-exchange.org/mailman/listinfo/mems-talk