Johns Hopkins Breakthrough could make microchips smaller than ever

A team of scientists discovered how to create circles that are so small that they are invisible to the naked eye using a process that is both precise and economical to produce.

The findings were published on September 11 in the journal The nature of chemical engineering.

“Companies have their own maps where they want to be 10 to 20 years old and beyond,” said Michael Tsapatsis, a professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering of Bloomberg at Johns Hopkins University. “One obstacle found a procedure for making smaller features in a production line in which you quickly and absolutely irradiate materials to make the procedure economical.”

Advanced lasers needed to imprint small formats already exist, Tsapatsis added, but researchers have been needed new materials and new processes to accommodate all smaller microchips.

Micročipi is flat pieces of silicon with impressed circles that perform basic functions. During production, manufacturers coat silicone resin with radiation sensitive material to create a very fine coating called “resistance”. When the beam of radiation is focused on resistance, it triggers a chemical reaction that burn details in the resin, drawing patterns and circles.

However, air beams with higher drives needed to pull out the increasing details of chips do not seem strong enough with traditional resistance.

Previously, researchers from Tsapatsis and research groups of Fairbrother in Johns Hopkins have revealed that resistors made from new metal organizations can accept this radiation process with a higher drive, called “outside of extreme ultraviolet radiation” (B-EUV), which can give details less than a current size of 10 nanniers. Metals such as zinc absorb B-eUV light and create electrons that cause chemical transformations needed to improve the circuit samples on an organic material called imidazole.

This study indicates one of the first scientists has managed to lay these metal-organic imidazole-organic resistance to a solution on the silicon scale, controlling their thickness with precision of the nanometer. In order to develop the chemistry needed to overcome silicone vafers with metal organic materials, the team combined experiments and models from Johns Hopkins University, University of Eastern China Science and Technology, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, University of Soochow, BRUKOKHAVNA National Lab Laboratory. The new methodology, which they call chemical fluid deposition (CLD), can be accurately designed and enabled researchers to quickly explore different combinations of metal and imidazole.

“Playing with two components (metal and imidazole), you can change the effectiveness of the absorption of light and chemistry of the following reactions. And that opens us up to create new metal organic couples,” Tsapatsis said. “The exciting thing is that there are at least 10 different metals that can be used for this chemistry and hundreds of organic substances.”

Researchers have started experimenting with different combinations to create couples especially for B-EUV radiation, which they say is likely to be used in production in the next 10 years.

“Because different wavelengths have different interactions with different elements, a metal that is a loser in one wavelength can be a winner with another,” Tsapatsis said. “Zinc is not very good for extreme ultraviolet radiation, but it is one of the best for B-EUV.”

Authors include Yurun Miao, Kayley Waltz and Xinpei Zhou of Johns Hopkins University; Liwei Zhuang, Shunyi Zheng, Yegui Zhou and Heting Wang of the University of Science and Technology of Eastern China; Mueed Ahmad and J. Anibal Boscoboin from the Brookhaven National Laboratory; Qi Liu of Soochow University; Kumar Varoon Agrawal of école Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne; and Oleg Kostko from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.