KNI Collaborators Win Two Awards at 2018 SPIE Photomask Technology + EUV Lithography Conference
Dr. Scott Lewis and Graduate Student Hayden Alty Receive Awards at 2018 SPIE Photomask Technology + EUV Lithography Conference in Monterey, CA in September.
The 2018 SPIE Photomask Technology + EUV Lithography Conference took place in Monterey, CA from September 15-19. Longtime KNI collaborator Dr. Scott Lewis from University of Manchester, received the Best Conference Oral Presentation award for his talk on "Design and implementation of the next-generation electron-beam resists for the production of EUVL photomasks". Dr. Lewis' student Hayden Alty took third place for the Zeiss Award for Best Student Poster on his work titled, "Using 3D Monte Carlo simulation to develop resists for next-generation lithography"
Dr. Lewis' is working on the research project, "Manufacturing at the 7nm node and beyond enabled by novel resist technology", which is funded under UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) Programme (Grant Ref: EP/R023158/1). Professor Richard Winpenny (University of Manchester) is the grant holder, with co-investigators Professor Stephen Yeates (University of Manchester) and Dr. Lewis. Caltech Professor Axel Scherer and Dr. Guy DeRose (KNI Associate Director of Technical Operations) are project partners.
The project addresses the future manufacturing of field-effect transistors (FETs) for use in the electronics market. A key component in such manufacturing is the resist material into which patterns are written. We are exploiting world-leading resists for electron-beam lithography to create vital structures including: masks for Extreme UltraViolet (EUV) lithography; heat sinks for heat dissipation in Fin-FETs; improved Schottky emitters. In parallel, we are engineering our resists to meet industry targets for resist materials for EUV lithography that write quickly, targeting known industrial specifications (e.g. 20 mJ cm-2), that give high resolution structures at half-pitch, with low line edge roughness. A world leading team of chemists, physicists, engineers and material scientists has been assembled and the outcome will be multiple breakthroughs that will enable manufacturing at the 7 nm node and beyond.
The project began in July 2018 when Dr. Lewis traveled to Caltech to join the KNI as a Visiting Associate in Professor Scherer's group, continuing a long collaboration going back to 2010. Initial research focused on development and characterization of novel resists by electron and ion-beam lithography to advance the state-of-the-art in EUV resist technology. Preliminary work was accepted as an invited talk at the SPIE Photomask and EUV Conference in Monterey, CA.
Key personnel included on the project are Dr. Matthew Hunt (KNI Associate Director of Staff Research; Lead Microscopist), Nathan Lee (KNI Plasma Process Engineer), Alex Wertheim (KNI Materials Process Engineer), Graduate Students Hayden Alty (University of Manchester), Jarvis Li (Caltech-Roukes), Trevor Fowler (Caltech-Roukes).
For more information on this research, please see their publication in Angewandte Chemie, "Use of Supramolecular Assemblies as Lithographic Resists", here.