Author
Wolfgang S. Bacsa , Ph.D., Professor at the Solid State Physics Laboratory at the Université Paul Sabatier, Toulouse, France. Wolfgang Bacsa has a Ph.D. from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH)...
The Impact of Semiconductor Industry on Nanotechnology
22 Mar, 2007 11:28 am
The advancement in semiconductor industry is changing research laboratories. Clean rooms have to be built, and lithography machines need to be installed. All this implies the construction of research centers providing these facilities and resulting in higher cost for carrying out cutting edge research. This demands that research to be organized differently then two decades ago. How much are government agencies instrumental in making the right changes, ready for it? Lack of awareness of basic facts about how research is changing and carried out today, is one of the most expensive factors in funding research. Knowing that nanotechnology will impact the economic future of society it is crucial that those who make funding decisions are sufficiently well informed.
The molecular universe
Looking at nature we find a large variety of molecules which organize themselves and once organized, can have very different properties without the use of any lithography technique. Two molecules of the same type have in addition the property that we cannot distinguish them since molecules, unlike solids, are perfect, meaning they have no defects. It is clear there is a huge potential in creating nanostructures using methods similar to how molecules are formed. These new methods have the potential to be considerably less expensive than projection lithography and as a result the exploration of the growth and the self-organization of nanostructures have multiplied in recent years. By tuning the parameters of the fabrication process, highly perfect nanostructures can be grown today. This approach to nanofabrication using no tool but controlling the growth process is called bottom-up. To give an example: while the chemical vapor deposition method produced highly defective carbon nanotubes one decade ago, tuning the process parameters have led to highly perfect carbon nanotubes which can be produced at high yield and is today the preferred method in producing carbon based nanostructures.
A less radical approach, new top-down tools
With increasing costs to fabricate nanostructures with projection lithography, a new fabrication tool has been developed by taking advantage of the different components of a projection lithography tool. Projection lithography uses masks which are used many times. The moment it becomes expensive to produce small structures it is possible to use the same structure to print patterns thereby reducing the cost of producing patterns at small scales. Several different types of imprint technologies are available today which produce nanostructures at substantially lower cost. However defects rates are higher than in projection lithography and it remains to be seen how far this process can be improved.
Learning from semiconductor industry
As semiconductor industry runs into more fundamental limits with the very process tool on which its success is based, interactions with public research labs have multiplied in order to solve some of the fundamental issues. But the industry has changed over the last two decades. Clean rooms are instrumental when fabricating at scales smaller than a dust corn. Furthermore, to connect to the macroscopic world a hierarchy of patterns is needed which makes projection lithography an important tool which cannot be ignored anymore in today’s nanotechnology research. We see clearly how the advancement in semiconductor industry is changing the research laboratories. Clean rooms have to be built, and lithography machines need to be installed. All this implies the construction of research centers providing these facilities and resulting in higher cost for carrying out cutting edge research. This demands that research to be organized differently then two decades ago. How much are government agencies instrumental in making the right changes, ready for it? Lack of awareness of basic facts about how research is changing and carried out today, is one of the most expensive factors in funding research. Knowing that nanotechnology will impact the economic future of society it is crucial that those who make funding decisions are well informed.
1 comment(s)
[1]
Comment by selva
13 Dec, 2007 06:19 pm
I need a notes for paper presentation.The topic is advancement in semiconductor technology. plz send me a notes.
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