Technical Talk - New Materials for Nanoelecttronics Manufacturing

Silicon-Containing Polymers as a Material Platform for Nanoelectronics ManufacturingDr. Qinghuang LinDirector and Distinguished EngineerASML Technology Development Center, San Jose, CAAbstract:Modern semiconductor microchips are the brain of the Information Age and the engine of the new knowledge-based economy. These ubiquitous and sophisticated microchips have fundamentally changed how human beings live, work, learn, communicate, do business, and interact with government. The steady increase in computing power resulting from these microchips, coupled with big data and advances in algorithms, has ushered in a new artificial intelligence (AI) era in the last few years, with stunning performances of some artificial intelligence computing systems, e.g. AlphaGo by Google. Crystalline silicon has been the material of choice for the ever smaller, faster, cheaper and more power-efficient transistors for over fifty (50) years. However, the pace of this phenomenal progress in transistor technology was threatened to slow down due to fundamental physical limits and economic considerations. In this talk, I will discuss amorphous silicon, in the form of polymers, as an enabling material platform to extend the miniaturization of the semiconductor microchips. I will present synthesis of silicon-containing polymers and their applications as three types of electronic materials: (1) photosensitive polymeric materials, called photoresists, used to “print” modern microchips; (2) on-chip electrical insulators prepared either by a dry chemical vapor deposition or a wet spin-on process; (3) photo-patternable on-chip low dielectric constant electrical insulators. These silicon-containing polymers have been commercialized and adopted for high-volume manufacturing of several generations of microchips. They have also enabled a new chip-making technology called multiple patterning that are indispensable for making some of the most popular electronic devices in the world today.Speaker Bio:Dr. Qinghuang Lin, Director and Distinguished Engineer at ASML Technology Development Center, San Jose, CA. Dr. Lin has spent most of his professional career at IBM. Previously he was a Research Staff Member and a Senior Manager at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York. He received his B.E. and M.S. degrees from Tsinghua University, Beijing, China and his Ph.D. degree from the University of Michigan—Ann Arbor. He was a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Texas at Austin prior to joining IBM. His research interests center on electronic materials for, nanofabrication and integration of devices and systems as well as the applications of these devices and systems in computing, life sciences, healthcare, etc.Dr. Lin is a Fellow of the American Chemical Society (ACS Fellow), a Fellow of the American Chemical Society Division of Polymeric Materials Science and Engineering (PMSE Fellow), a Fellow of the American Chemical Society Division of Polymer Chemistry (POLY Fellow) and a Fellow of the International Society for Optical and Photonics Engineering (SPIE Fellow). He served as the Chair of the American Chemical Society Division of Polymeric Materials Science and Engineering (PMSE) in 2016.An IBM Master Inventor, Dr. Lin holds over 100 granted US patents and has authored/co-authored more than 100 publications. He is a recipient of 28 IBM Invention Plateau Achievement Awards. His inventions have been adopted in the mass production of advanced microchips for high-performance supercomputers and some of the most popular electronic devices today. Dr. Lin is a co-recipient of several IBM Research Division Awards. He is a winner of the 2017 Mahboob Khan Outstanding Industry Liaison Award from Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC). In 2018, he received the Industrial Polymer Scientist Award from the American Chemical Society Polymer Chemistry Division for “outstanding industrial innovation and creativity in the application of Polymer Science.” He is the winner of the 2020 Roy W. Tess Award from the American Chemical Society Division of Polymeric Materials Science and Engineering for “outstanding individual achievements and note-worthy contributions to coatings science, technology and engineering.” A 248 nm bilayer photoresist technology Dr. Lin co-developed was part of the 40 years of innovations in semiconductor technology that won IBM the 2004 US National Medal of Technology.A frequent organizer and speaker of scientific conferences at ACS, MRS, SPIE and SEMI, Dr. Lin is the editor or co-editor of 19 books or proceedings volumes and 3 journal special issues. He has given 75 keynote or invited lectures worldwide. He is an Associate Editor of Journal of Micro/Nanolithography, MEMS, and MOEMS and serve on the Editorial Advisory Board of Chemistry of Materials.