Directed self-assembly of block copolymers for 7 nanometre FinFET technology and beyond

Globalfoundries recently announced that they have dropped all plans on putting 7 nm FinFET technology in production (LINK). Presumably this means that any advanced development for 7nm and beyond patterning has been stopped as well. In any case here is an excellent publication submitted before that announcment coming from the collaborative development from some of the most advanced semiconductor development centers in the USA - IBM Research at Albany NanoTech, TEL Technology Center, America in Albany, GlobalFoundries, and IBM Research TJ Watson in Yorktown Heights and IBM Research Almaden, San Jose.

They use different versions of directed self assembly (DSA) of block co-polymers (BCP) and spacer defined double patterning. ALD is used for spacers as well as very thin ALD SiN hardmasks. All this is all done without EUV like in the Samsung 2nd Generation 7nm FinFET or self aligned quadruple patterning (SAQP) like in the Intel 10 nm FinFET) - Impressive!

Some details are given in the Supplementary info (below).

Directed self-assembly of block copolymers for 7 nanometre FinFET technology and beyond

Nature Electronics volume 1, pages562–569 (2018)

Supplementary information : LINK (OPEN)