News Release

New ways of making super small-scale devices

Scientists are working to speed up the chip-making process and make chips more flexible so masks aren't needed

Grant and Award Announcement

Oregon Health & Science University

PORTLAND, Ore. -- Building a computer chip is a painstaking process. Once a chip is designed, a mask, or template, is created and used to transfer the fine circuit patterns to the surface of a silicon wafer. (The silicon wafer is the substrate for the transistors, wires, etc., and can produce a handful of chips). If anything goes wrong with the mask, or if the tiniest change is needed, an entirely new mask must be created.

Scientists at OHSU's OGI School of Science & Engineering are working to speed up the chip-making process, reduce manufacturing costs and make chips more flexible so that new masks won't have to be created if mistakes are made that cause the chip not to operate, or to operate poorly. This significantly shortens the development time for new chips.

With a recent $100,000, one-year grant from the National Science Foundation, four researchers in the school's Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering will build and demonstrate a tool that can create patterns on an extremely small scale (nanotech) for use in electronics, sensors and electrical mechanical systems.

"The current methods for transferring patterns to chips and fabricating masks - photolithography and single electron beam lithography respectively - offer poor resolution and are slow," said Jack McCarthy, Ph.D., a materials scientist and lead investigator on the project. "We are using a focused ion beam milling machine to develop a prototype source that will allow us to create and focus many individually controlled computerized laser beams with small enough spot sizes to transfer nanoscale patterns directly to the wafer without the use of masks. The computer control allows us to easily make pattern changes and modifications." To build the tool, McCarthy and his colleagues start with a substrate/window made of sapphire. The vacuum side of the window is coated with a relatively thick film of gold. A focused ion beam (FIB) is then used to cut arrays of cylindrical holes to expose tiny discs of sapphire.

A second layer of much thinner gold is deposited to coat the exposed sapphire. Each one of the discs in the sapphire is the source for an electron beam. So when the laser shines a broad beam of ultraviolet light through the sapphire window onto the array of discs, electrons pop out the vacuum side of the gold film disks, creating many beams. The beams are generated down a column, focused and reduced to form the pattern with many beams on the work piece. (The work piece in this case is an electron sensitive polymer (thin film) on a silicon substrate, which allows scientists to create very fine patterns with lines as small as 1/100,000 of a millimeter in width onto silicon wafers. The diameter of a human hair is approximately one-tenth of a millimeter).

"We are going to study the stability of the electron emission current that is produced by the thin film when the laser hits it," said McCarthy. "We're also going to test a variety of metals and thin film stacks as electron sources so we can, hopefully, increase the intensity and improve stability.

"We'll also deposit an insulated metal ring around each source so that by applying computer-controlled voltages, we can control the intensity of the beam or shut it off like a light switch with a dimmer," said McCarthy. "If we can figure out a way to individually control the intensity of each beam with a computer, it will ultimately enable chip makers much more flexibility when patterning chips and speed up the development process for new chips, as well as the manufacturing of chips."

On average, it takes chip makers eight hours to create one mask to transfer one pattern to the multilayered chip, and it can take up to 25 hours to complete the chip, said McCarthy. Masks with really fine details - lots of transistors and metals and connecting wires - can take even longer and will become impractical at this scale in the near future.

McCarthy's team includes physicist and surface scientist John Freeouf, Ph.D., and electrical engineers Neil Berglund, Ph.D., and Jody House, Ph.D., and several graduate students.

Few university researchers in the United States - and none in Oregon - are currently doing research on multielectron beam lithography to pattern chips with such fine detail, said McCarthy. The OGI researchers' study has profound implications for the microelectronics industry, which will need higher-density chips to provide more memory, and smarter, faster processors as we give computers, cell phones and other electronic devices more tasks.

The research also holds promise for biotechnology in providing electromechanical systems, sensors, processing and memory in smaller and smaller packages for use in such applications as drug delivery systems. In addition to lithography, this multielectron beam approach will speed up the testing of finished chips (e-beam review), and improve the imaging and analysis of materials on the atomic scale.

"We hope to be able to create a prototype nanolithography tool that can be used by a variety of microelectronics and biotechnology researchers at OHSU," said McCarthy. "Our small version will be the nuts and bolts needed for a complete production electron lithography machine for handling entire wafers. This research will be the first step toward making a variety of nanotechnology applications practical in development and production. It's really quite amazing."

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The OGI School of Science & Engineering (formerly the Oregon Graduate Institute of Science & Technology) became one of four schools of the Oregon Health & Science University in 2001. The School of Science & Engineering has more than 100 full-time and adjunct faculty, and more than 300 master's and doctoral students seeking degrees in five academic departments. In addition, there are 250 students taking credit courses, but not seeking degrees at this time. Each year, the school's Center for Professional Development enrolls more than 1,000 working professionals who take not-for-credit classes.

Note: A photo of McCarthy is available at www.ohsu.edu/news/

To access all OHSU news releases, please visit www.ohsu.edu/news/

Contact: Sydney Clevenger; clevenge@ohsu.edu; 503 748-1546
Mike MacRae; macraem@ohsu.edu; 503 748-1042


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