50 nanotimes News in Brief
Semiconductors // New Technique to Improve Efficiency of Semiconducting Materials, © Based on Material by Jared Sagoff, ANL, USA
A relentless move toward smaller and more precisely defined semiconductors has prompted researchers at the US Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory to develop a new technique that can dramatically improve the efficiency and reduce the cost of preparing different classes of semiconducting materials. The new discovery meets certain requirements of the international semiconductor “roadmap” all the way out to 2022-leapfrogging an anticipated ten years of progress with a single set of experiments. The drive to create smaller and smaller semiconductor components is often limited by a phenomenon known as domain collapse, said Argonne nanoscientist Seth Darling. Conventional lithography – the technique used to make patterns in materials – attempts to create features that are separated like the teeth of a comb. However, gaps in the resist that are too deep tend to collapse inwards, which makes the material useless. In 2010, Darling and his colleagues developed a technique known as sequential infiltration synthesis (SIS), which used gases to grow hard inorganic materials inside a soft polymer film. The work was supported by the DOE Office of Science through Argonne’s Center for Nanoscale Materials and the Argonne-Northwestern Solar Energy Research Center. One of the most notable benefits of SIS is that it eliminates the need for hard masks in photolithography, according to Darling. "Hard masks are a real pain when it comes to semiconductor processing – they’re expensive, complicated, reduce pattern quality and add extra steps," he said.
According to Darling, sequential infiltration synthesis has already been identified by leading semiconductor companies as a technology with the potential to overcome several different limitations. In a recent experiment, Darling and his Argonne colleagues showed that SIS can actually eliminate pattern collapse, enabling the fabrication of materials that have patterns with higher "aspect ratios," which measures the height of a feature divided by its width.
Generally speaking, lithography seeks to create patterns with higher aspect ratios while using as little resist as possible. "Usually, you need a certain thickness of the resist in order for the process to work," Darling said. "This new process enables us to do away with a lot of that problem."
"One of the biggest advantages of this new study is that we’ve shown the possibility of using SIS for photolithography, which is one of the most industrially important processes," Darling said. "As there’s more and more demand for better electronics, the sizes of these semiconductors need to keep getting smaller and smaller, and it becomes that much more important for us to meet and exceed the benchmarks that we’ve set for ourselves."
Yu-Chih Tseng, Anil U. Mane, Jeffrey W. Elam, Seth B. Darling: Enhanced Lithographic Imaging Layer Meets Semiconductor Manufacturing Specification a Decade Early, In: Advanced Materials, Volume 24, Issue 19, May 15, 2012, Pages 2608-2613, DOI:10.1002/adma.201104871:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/adma.201104871
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89