Wednesday was the peak of busy for me, attending many papers (and giving one). It was also a very typical day in that almost all of the papers I saw were exactly what I expected: incremental advances. Nothing jaw dropping, just the small advances that have fueled this industry\u2019s progress for the 40 years I have been involved. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Jodi Grzeskowiak of TEL did a great job explaining their new \u201canti-spacer\u201d process, using acid diffusion into a resist pattern to form a skin that turns into a negative tone version of a spacer pattern. She described it as a \u201ctrack-based pitch split.\u201d I was especially happy that the process didn\u2019t have a cute acronym with a trademark symbol and no description of how it worked.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Indira Seshadri of IBM showed off what IBM is good at, optimizing all aspect of a process (in this case the Lam dry resist) to get high yield at tight pitches. Hyeon Bo Shim of Samsung provided a simple geometric model for how electrons escape out of a contact hole (for the case of vertical sidewalls only), showing that the aspect ratio controls the visibility of the hole bottom. Since I am a coauthor (with Ben Bunday) on a paper on a similar topic on Thursday, I was especially interested. I\u2019ve already checked out this Samsung geometric model against our SEM simulations and it works surprisingly well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Boris Habets (KLA) collected overlay data on the \u201cmicron scale\u201d.\u00a0 He was able to measure overlay directly on the device, but did so in a memory cell so that he could achieve extremely high sampling over length scales we don\u2019t normally interrogate. \u00a0Over a distance of a few microns overlay variations are not due to scanner effects, but rather shorter-range proximity effects.\u00a0 In this case, each memory array tile (a few microns square) had a regular signature, possibly due to film stress relaxation.\u00a0 The magnitude was a few tenths of a nanometer, but if stable and consistent would be correctable on the mask.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I attempted to attend the panel discussion on the future of EUV lithography, but was unsuccessful.\u00a0 The event was standing room only, and I was unwilling the elbow my way through the crowd standing three deep at the door.\u00a0 I hope it was useful.\u00a0 I did make it to the poster session, however, and actually walked the whole circuit.\u00a0 There were some nice posters and a fun crowd.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Wednesday was the peak of busy for me, attending many papers (and giving one). It was also a very typical day in that almost all of the papers I saw were exactly what I expected: incremental advances. Nothing jaw dropping, just the small advances that have fueled this industry\u2019s progress for the 40 years I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[4,6],"class_list":["post-713","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-microlithography","tag-mircrolithography","tag-spie"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/713","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=713"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/713\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":716,"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/713\/revisions\/716"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=713"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=713"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=713"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}