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This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will explore an improved process of manufacturing Silicon-on-Insulator (SOI) wafers. The SOI process includes: (1) forming a hydrogen-rich buried layer in a donor silicon wafer; (2) prebonding the donor wafer to a handle wafer; (3) cleaving the donor wafer along the buried layer to thinner top silicon; and (4) postbonding and surface smoothing of the final SOI wafer. An initial wafer is oxidized allowing it to get the buried oxide of SOI. A new feature is an improved activation of wafer surfaces to be bonded. Activation is termination of surfaces with either hydrogen or with hydroxyl groups. Preliminary results show that the terminated surfaces contain more than a monolayer of hydrogen. And the excessive adsorbed hydrogen causes transfer faults during subsequent layer transfer. The Phase I activation process allows control of the hydrogen dose. The process uses radio frequency plasma treatment instead of wet processing. It is expected that the yield of the SOI process will be increased. The new process will be used in the silicon wafer market, which currently totals $10B annually. Estimates indicate that SOI wafers will increase to around 20% of this market within 10 years as SOI is one of the few solutions for production wafers based on less than 0.18 micron design rules.