Today's processors owe
advancement to chemically amplified photoresists.
|
C. Grant Willson |
Chemically Amplified Resists – "materials used in
lithography to form the structures in today's semiconductor devices" –
developed at IBM's research lab in San Jose in the early 1980s (the lab since
moved to Almaden, CA in 1986) by professors C. Grant
Willson (who was working at IBM Research at the time, and earned the rank
of IBM Fellow for this work), and Jean M. J. Fréchet,
who joined the team while on sabbatical from the University of Ottawa, and the
late IBM Fellow Dr.
Hiroshi Ito, earned the 2013 Japan
Prize.
|
Jean
M. J. Fréchet
|
Without Chemically Amplified Resists, Moore’s Law, the measure
of progress applied to the entire semiconductor industry, would not exist. And
everything from flash memory, DRAM, to
video processor speed would be stuck in the 1980s (think 1,500 nanometer
semiconductors, 16-bit, 20 MHz, 128Kb of memory). The IBM breakthrough led to
the printing of sub-500 nm semiconductors onto silicon wafers, and the speed
and (small) size of technology used today – that’s now pushing beyond 50nm.
Amplifying the effects
|
Hiroshi Ito |
So, what did the team do differently? They developed a
photoresist that could generate a chain reaction that, in turn, amplified
low-intensity UV light (sub-250nm wave length, which was unusable in previous
manufacturing) onto a substrate – creating a precise, high-contrast etchings on
circuits at previously impossible sizes. This cascading effect has been
employed in the manufacturing of semiconductors used in almost all electronics
for the last 20 years – and will continue to drive compute speed and power into
the foreseeable future.
The Japan
Prize Foundation will recognize Willson of The University of Texas at
Austin, and Fréchet of the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology
in April of this year. The foundation has awarded the Japan Prize since 1985 “to
scientists whose achievements contribute to the progress of science and
technology and the promotion of peace and prosperity for humankind.”
Labels: chemically amplified photoresists, Japan Prize, lithography, moore's law, semiconductor