Page 16 - Autumn 2024

Industry News

NEW METHODS FOR

MAKING SMALLER

MICROCHIPS

Researchers at Johns Hopkins University have Michael Tsapatsis, a Bloomberg Distinguished
discovered new materials and a new process for Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering
making smaller microchips by creating circuits at Johns Hopkins University, comments:
that are so small that they are invisible to the naked
“By playing with the two components, metal
eye.
and imidazole, you can change the efficiency
During production, manufacturers coat silicon wafers of absorbing the light and the chemistry of the
with a radiation-sensitive material to create a very following reactions, and that opens us up to
fine coating known as a ‘resist’. When a beam of creating new metal-organic pairings. The exciting
radiation is pointed at this a chemical reaction is thing is there are at least ten different metals that
triggered allowing details to be burnt into the wafer, can be used for this chemistry, and hundreds of
organics.
so drawing patterns and circuitry. Unfortunately,
however, the higher powered radiation beams Because different wavelengths have different
required to carve out ever smaller details do not interactions with different elements, a metal that is
currently interact strongly enough with traditional a loser in one wavelength can be a winner with the
resists. other. Zinc is not very good for extreme ultraviolet
radiation, but it’s one of the best for the B-EUV”.
At Johns Hopkins a new class of metal-organics has
been used to create resists that can accommodate
The Institution would like to thank Johns Hopkins University for this
the higher-powered radiation process known as submission.
‘beyond extreme ultraviolet radiation’, or B-EUV, which
can potentially make details smaller that the current
size of 10 nanometres. Metals such as zinc absorb the
B-EUV light and generate electrons that cause the
chemical transformations that are needed to imprint
circuit patterns on an organic material known as
imidazole.

This research marks one of the first times that
scientists have been able to deposit imidazole-
based metal-organic resists from solution at
silicon-wafer scale, controlling their thickness with
nanometre precision. The new methodology has
been termed chemical liquid deposition (CLD) and it
allows researchers to explore various combinations
of metals and imidazoles. Experiments have now
commenced with different combinations being used
to create pairings designed specifically for B-EUV
radiation.

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