(Invited) Vapor-Phase Infiltration for Microelectronics Applications

Vapor-phase infiltration (VPI) is an emerging organic-inorganic materials hybridization technique derived from atomic layer deposition (ALD) wherein gaseous organometallic precursors and co-reactants diffuse into starting organic templates in a sequential and cyclic manner and become hybridized with the organic matrix. The resulting hybrids feature uniquely enhanced materials properties, including but not limited to mechanical, chemical, dielectric, optical, and electrical properties, which are controllable by the type and amount of infiltrated inorganic species. When combined with polymer templates with either dimensional confinement (e.g., lithographically defined polymer patterns) or intrinsic spatial chemical contrast (e.g., self-assembled block copolymer (BCP) thin films), the technique also yields a site-specific infiltration, analogous to area-selective ALD, creating a spatially localized hybridization. Furthermore, the organic matrix of such infiltrated hybrids can be selectively removed by plasma ashing and thermal annealing to generate inorganic nanostructures that inherit the morphology of starting polymer templates, providing an alternative inorganic nanopatterning methodology. In this talk, I will showcase how these features of VPI can be utilized for the applications in microelectronics, including: (a) arbitrary patterning ultrahigh aspect-ratio metal oxide nanostructures; (b) generation of metal-oxide-based nanowire and nanomesh structures for conductometric sensing; and (c) VPI-derived metal-oxide-infiltrated hybrid photoresists for extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography.