Invited Paper NM-WeM1
Emerging Materials for Nanomanufacturing

Wednesday, October 17, 2007, 8:00 am, Room 615

The emerging nanomaterials era offers novel tool sets that exhibit the potential for addressing the ITRS’s concurrent vision for enhancing functional density and driving new waves of market opportunities. Though significant materials challenges remain, new generations of smart patterning materials and assembly methods likely will enable the continued scaling of extreme CMOS, the integration of heterogeneous nanomaterials onto silicon platforms, and functional diversification. However, it remains to be seen whether potential material solutions are identified and matured in time to impact key insertion windows. One key challenge is the extensibility of optical patterning. At the November 1992 Semiconductor Technology Workshop, the demise of optical patterning was projected to occur in 2001, after the 180 nm technology node. This corresponded to nine years or three technology nodes, n+3, out from the then current 500 nm technology node, n. The 1994 and 1997 National Technology Roadmaps for Semiconductors (NTRS) conveyed similar messages that optical lithography would end after the 130 nm and 100 nm generations, respectively, or n+3 nodes out from the current technology nodes. The 1999 and 2003 International Technology Roadmaps for Semiconductors (ITRS) also predicted lithography’s end n+3 technology nodes out from the current 180 nm and 90 nm nodes, respectively. The 2003 and 2006 ITRS potential solutions roadmaps for exposure tool technologies suggested that optical lithography would not be viable beyond the 32 nm and 22 nm nodes, respectively. Only the 2001 update of the ITRS conveyed a more near term, n+2, transition to a non-optical lithography technology, after the 65 nm node. Over the last forty years, considerable attention was focused on the exposure tool and mask infrastructure. Cumulative investments in developing exposure tool and mask related technologies are on the order of $10B and $1B, respectively. During this same period, relatively modest investments were made in the development of imaging materials, such as photo resists. However, line edge roughness (LER) and line width roughness (LWR) increasingly challenge our ability to achieve uniform electrical properties in the deep nanometer transistor domain. Additionally, the discussion about the interdependence between LER and dopant nano-roughness and their impact on device properties is just beginning to happen. This talk will consider the limitations of current families of lithographic materials and suggest emerging patterning materials that may satisfy projected nanofabrication requirements, including LER, long range dimensional control, resolution, and functionality. The materials science needed to develop these new generations of robust imaging materials for future information processing technologies represents a relatively unexplored and untapped frontier. Today’s convergence difficult nanofabrication challenges, emerging market drivers, and recent breakthroughs in materials technology offers a rare opportunity for chemists, chemical engineers, materials scientists, and others to develop breakthrough material and process insertion options will impact future nanofabrication technology. This research area exhibits the potential for keeping the demise of optical patterning n+3 generations away from current technology, for nodes to come.