Porous Diblock Copolymer Thin Films in High-Performance Semiconductor Microelectronics
The engine fueling more than 40 years of performance improvements in semiconductor integrated circuits (ICs) has been industry's ability to pattern circuit elements at ever-higher resolution and with ever-greater precision. Steady advances in photolithography - the process wherein ultraviolet light chemically changes a photosensitive polymer resist material in order to create a latent image - have resulted in scaling of minimum printed feature sizes from tens of microns during the 1980s to sub-50 nanometer transistor gate lengths in today's state-of-the-art ICs. The history of semiconductor technology scaling as well as future technology requirements is documented in the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors (ITRS). The progression of the semiconductor industry to the realm of nanometer-scale sizes has brought enormous challenges to device and circuit fabrication, rendering performance improvements by conventional scaling alone increasingly difficult. Most often this discussion is couched in terms of field effect transistor (FET) feature sizes such as the gate length or gate oxide thickness, however these challenges extend to many other aspects of the IC, including interconnect dimensions and pitch, device packing density, power consumption, and heat dissipation. The ITRS Technology Roadmap forecasts a difficult set of scientific and engineering challenges with no presently-known solutions. The primary focus of this chapter is the research performed at IBM on diblock copolymer films composed of polystyrene (PS) and poly(methyl-methacrylate) (PMMA) (PS-b-PMMA) with total molecular weights M{sub n} in the range of {approx}60K (g/mol) and polydispersities (PD) of {approx}1.1. These materials self assemble to form patterns having feature sizes in the range of 15-20nm. PS-b-PMMA was selected as a self-assembling patterning material due to its compatibility with the semiconductor microelectronics manufacturing infrastructure, as well as the significant body of existing research on understanding its material properties.
- Research Organization:
- Brookhaven National Lab. (BNL), Upton, NY (United States). Center for Functional Nanomaterials (CFN)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- DOE - Office Of Science
- DOE Contract Number:
- DE-AC02-98CH10886
- OSTI ID:
- 992132
- Report Number(s):
- BNL-94325-2010-BC; KC020401H; TRN: US201022%%138
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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Related Subjects
ACCURACY
COMPATIBILITY
COPOLYMERS
DIMENSIONS
ENGINES
FABRICATION
FIELD EFFECT TRANSISTORS
INTEGRATED CIRCUITS
LATENT IMAGES
MANUFACTURING
MICROELECTRONICS
MOLECULAR WEIGHT
OXIDES
PERFORMANCE
POLYMERS
POLYSTYRENE
RESOLUTION
THICKNESS
THIN FILMS
TRANSISTORS
self assembly
block copolymers
microelectronics
functional nanomaterials