Trends in plasma-enhanced atomic layer deposition

The mysterious Plasma ALD Guy (PAG) had a great time at ALD 2016 this past week. PAG presented a poster on Tuesday evening that was enjoyed by many. If you missed it, you can check it out here.

Based on the review 2013 to 2015 South Korea is in the lead judging by the number of PEALD publications followed by USA and Germany. Striking is the lack of PEALD publications coming from the leading ALD centers of Helsinki University, VTT and Aalto University.

The other observation is that >75% of all PEALD is performed for pretty basic ALD materials (Al2O3, AlN, TiO2) using basic ALD precursors like TMA. The Finnish ALD community has a strong tradition of focusing on new precursor chemistries and new materials and that may be an explanation why PEALD is not in the focus there.

You also see that Turkey is very strong represented in this field. Unfortunately many of the Turkish Scientists were not allowed to participate in ALD2016.

Winners of the ALD2016 Twitter competition - The #ALDToughGirls

Prof. Henrik Pedersen from Linköping university in Sweden won the Twitter competition at ALD2016. He tweeded actively and managed to cover all aspects of the conference - Scientiffically and Socially and personal funny observations. He also made the innoficial #ALDToughGuys vs. #ALDToughGirls competition go to the girls this time. Maybe ALD2017 will have mixed teams #ALDToughScientists instead?

 

Photos from ALD.com and Twitter.com

Honor should also go to Miia Mäntymäki for being the first Tough Girl on twitter. Later she enjoyed GTs with the toughest of all ALD Scientists, Tero Pilvi from Picosun at the Airport. He can chew gum and talk Swedish at the same time - it is a self-limmited process.

Photo from Tero Pilvi at facebook.com, the moment just before starting to talk Swedish...

#ALDToughGirls #ALDToughGuys @PicosunALD Pico Party (twitter.com)

Some asorted looser ALD Tough Guys below:

Pictures from Twitter.com #ALDToughGuys

Wayne State presented new ALD chemistries for low temperature tantalum and selective cobalt at ALD2016

Prof. Chuck Winter and his team at Wayne State presented new ALD chemistries for low temperature tantalum and selective cobalt at ALD 2016 Ireland this week. Both processes are very important for todays scaling of logic and memory technologies. Metallic tantalum can be used in workfunction engineering of HKMG high performance FinFET transitors as well as for Cu seed/barrier technology in BEOL. Cobalt is as tantantlum an option for Cu barrier/seed and also used selectivly to cap the Cu lines and vias from oxidising and reducing RC performance.

The best highlight talk went to Marissa Kerrigan from Wayne State as voted by attendees on novel Co recursor chemistry for selective Cobalt (Left Marissa Kerrigan, right Simon Elliott, photo by ALD2016.com).

“This opens up the prospect of using tantalum in layers just a few nanometers thick as the liner for interconnect wiring in the complex geometries of next-generation electronic chips,” said the University, which worked with German chemicals giant BASF on the project accoring to Electronic Weekly.

Marissa Kerrigan also from Wayne State announced novel ALD chemistry for metallic cobalt that showed excellent selectivity to copper (photo by ALD2016.com).

“The Wayne State processes for tantalum and cobalt are significant steps forward in controlled growth of ultra-thin metals,” said conference chair, Dr Simon Elliott of Ireland’s Tyndall National Institute. “Strong growth is projected for area-selective deposition: in the near future, it will allow higher-precision patterning of semiconductor chips, and in the longer term it will be an enabler for manufacturing nano-structured materials on demand.” according to the same article in Electronics Weekly.

ALD History Blog: ALD history at ALD 2016 Ireland

ALD History Blog: ALD history at ALD 2016 Ireland: Prof Greg Parsons introducing Prof Anatoly Malygin to give a plenary talk at ALD 2016. Photo by Riikka Puurunen. The  ALD 2016  confer...