Report from the 3rd Area Selective Deposition Workshop (ASD 2018) at North Carolina State University

In late April (April 29 – May 1, 2018) the 3rd Area Selective Deposition Workshop (ASD 2018), was held at North Carolina State University in Raleigh North Carolina USA (LINK). This years workshop was organized with full support from AVS and as for ALD and ALE Della Miller was in charge.

The Workshop brought together leading international scientists and engineers from academia and industry from all regions to share results and insights into: 1) fundamental principles and barriers to area selective deposition; 2) technological needs and challenges of ASD; 3) new chemical approaches and processes to address the expanding needs; and 4) surface characterization techniques and metrology innovation for ASD.

This third year the program was expanded to two days, including 11 invited presentations, an invited panel discussion, 18 contributed talks, and 15 posters and in between there was plenty of time for interaction over meals and social events.

ASD2018 brought together leading experts from 10 countries in Asia, Europe and America, to deliver and discuss more than 45 presentations. As the chart shows, this constitutes significant growth since the first ASD Workshop in 2016 (ASD2018 Book of Abstracts).

As a particular focus this year, the committee had chosen to highlight the challenge of selective deposition metrology, including an invited panel to discuss particular issues and techniques related to selectivity measurement and selective defect quantification.

It is clear that ASD is a fast growing field and may at some point in time reach the status as a stand alone segment with respect to processing, chemicals and equipment. Another indication can be seen that at the SPIE in February there was a high number of presentations and posters on combining ALD and ALE or just Area Selective Deposition.

Program Char Prof. Gregory N. Parsons of North Carolina State University, USA has asked to share some photos form the successful event (below). In addition, an article covering the event was just published by Chemical & Engineering News (LINK) including interviews and the latest insights from Dennis M. Hausmann (Lam Research), Gregory N. Parsons, Silvia Armini (invited speaker, imec), Dara Bobb-Semple and Stacey F. Bent (Stanford University), and Steven M. George (Colorado Boulder University).

Studying the Book of Abstract, my personal favorite is the atmospheric pressure micro-plasma printer for area-selective ALD presented by Prof. Kessels (TU Eindhoven). This technology is being commercialized by the Dutch company with InnoPhysics (LINK) and you can expect to hear more details about this exciting technology soon.

Rear view from the The StateView Hotel conference room (Photo: Gregory N. Parsons).

Junling Lu from University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei presenting "Bottom-up Engineering Catalyst Nanostructures using Area-Selective Atomic Layer Deposition" (Photo: Gregory N. Parsons).