Means Found to Potentially Prevent Defects in Integrated Circuits

[Guest_Jim_*]

Defects can be very important in the semiconductor industry as these imperfections can translate into missed release dates, broken products, and lost revenue. Naturally then, many methods are used to reduce the number of defects, but as the circuitry gets smaller it becomes much harder to maintain a standard of less than one defect per 100 cm². Luckily researchers at Argonne National Laboratory have made a discovery that should help, even as circuitry shrinks.

Current methods for creating computer chips involve photoresist polymers, which allow one to control where a material is etched. The problem is that there is a limit to how small these polymers can be. The new solution is to turn to block copolymer molecules, because they can self-assemble into desired shapes with great density and precision. The trick has been making sure the copolymers are in a stable state, so that the pattern will not change, as opposed to metastable states. Copolymers can exist in a metastable state for long periods of time though, so the researchers used supercomputers to figure out the energy barriers between these and lower-energy stable states. This allows the researchers to find the path the molecules can take from a metastable state to a stable state.

Armed with this knowledge, manufacturers should be able to take advantage of block copolymers to significantly reduce the defects in the products they produce. Now the researchers will continue their work by looking into more materials, building more complex patterns, and potentially creating 3D structures for more advanced technologies.

Source: Argonne National Laboratory

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