Predicting And Preventing Process Drift


Increasingly tight tolerances and rigorous demands for quality are forcing chipmakers and equipment manufacturers to ferret out minor process variances, which can create significant anomalies in device behavior and render a device non-functional. In the past, many of these variances were ignored. But for a growing number of applications, that's no longer possible. Even minor fluctuations in ... » read more

Enabling Advanced Devices With Atomic Layer Processes


Atomic layer deposition (ALD) used to be considered too slow to be of practical use in semiconductor manufacturing, but it has emerged as a critical tool for both transistor and interconnect fabrication at the most advanced nodes. ALD can be speeded up somewhat, but the real shift is the rising value of precise composition and thickness control at the most advanced nodes, which makes the ext... » read more

Navigating the Metrology Maze For GAA FETs


The chip industry is pushing the boundaries of innovation with the evolution of finFETs to gate-all-around (GAA) nanosheet transistors at the 3nm node and beyond, but it also is adding significant new metrology challenges. GAA represents a significant advancement in transistor architecture, where the gate material fully encompasses the nanosheet channel. This approach allows for the vertical... » read more

Optimizing The Growth And Transfer Process of Graphene (Cambridge, RWTH Aachen)


A technical paper titled "Putting High-Index Cu on the Map for High-Yield, Dry-Transferred CVD Graphene" was published by researchers at University of Cambridge, RWTH Aachen University, and National Institute for Materials Science. Abstract: "Reliable, clean transfer and interfacing of 2D material layers are technologically as important as their growth. Bringing both together remains a ch... » read more

2D Semiconductor Materials Creep Toward Manufacturing


As transistors scale down, they need thinner channels to achieve adequate channel control. In silicon, though, surface roughness scattering degrades mobility, limiting the ultimate channel thickness to about 3nm. Two-dimensional transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs), such as MoS2 and WSe2, are attractive in part because they avoid this limitation. With no out-of-plane dangling bonds and at... » read more

How Far Will Copper Interconnects Scale?


As leading chipmakers continue to scale finFETs — and soon nanosheet transistors — to ever-tighter pitches, the smallest metal lines eventually will become untenable using copper with its liner and barrier metals. What comes next, and when, is still to be determined. There are multiple options being explored, each with its own set of tradeoffs. Ever since IBM introduced the industry to c... » read more

High-Temperature Stable Spin-On Carbon Materials For Advanced Pattern Transfer Applications


In recent years a strong demand has arisen for spin-on carbon (SOC) materials compatible with high-temperature processes. This requirement is to enable usage of high-temperature SOC (HTSOC) materials in integration schemes utilizing chemical vapor deposition (CVD) and/or atomic layer deposition (ALD) processes. In addition to compatibility with the high-temperature deposition processes, planari... » read more

2D Semiconductors Make Progress, But Slowly


Researchers are looking at a variety of new materials at future nodes, but progress remains slow. In recent years, 2D semiconductors have emerged as a leading potential solution to the problem of channel control in highly scaled transistors. As devices shrink, the channel thickness should shrink proportionally. Otherwise, the gate capacitance won’t be large enough to control the flow of cu... » read more

High-performance flexible nanoscale transistors based on transition metal dichalcogenides


Read the paper here. Published June 17, 2021, Nature Electronics. Abstract Two-dimensional (2D) semiconducting transition metal dichalcogenides could be used to build high-performance flexible electronics. However, flexible field-effect transistors (FETs) based on such materials are typically fabricated with channel lengths on the micrometre scale, not benefitting from the short-channel advan... » read more

High-Temperature-Stable, Spin-On Carbon Materials For High-Aspect-Ratio Gap-Fill Applications


Brewer Science, Inc. has developed a class of novel, high-temperature-stable spin-on carbon (SOC)-based materials with excellent processability. These SOCs are cured under mild conditions and have flow properties that enable the fill of high-aspect-ratio vias in a void-free manner. Moreover, this new class of SOCs has remarkable thermal stability and can survive temperatures of up to 550°C wit... » read more

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