Faculty in the Cockrell School of Engineering developed a rare printer, as part of a larger project to speed up production and lower costs of manufacturing semiconductors critical to modern electronics.
Currently, manufacturing semiconductors has such a high entry cost that only a few companies in the world can do it at a commercial scale. Extreme Ultraviolet (EUV) lithography uses machines to "print" circuits onto a silicon substrate using a complex series of mirrors, tin and a mask, that then becomes the computer chips in phones, laptops and other devices.
EUV lithography printers will usually run the average buyer more than $200 million and take up an entire room. Texas Engineers and their partners created a table-top EUV lithography device by stripping the traditional printer down to just basic components. This system is more versatile for researchers, more modular and less expensive.
And they've paired this new device with a printing technique called volumetric 3D patterning, which overcomes a key roadblock in existing processes. Commercial EUV lithography can only print 3D nanostructures in 2D steps, going layer by layer.
"The actual printing might not take very long," said Chih-Hao Chang, one of the lead authors on a new paper published in Nano Letters . "But the processing can take days."
Chang, a professor in the Walker Department of Mechanical Engineering, has worked with other researchers to develop a technique to print 3D nanostructures in parallel: multiple "layers" at a time. Exposures take minutes, not days.
The research stems from the National Science Foundation Future of Semiconductors (FuSe2) competition (NSF FuSe2), which is focused on driving down the cost of research for this critical science.
The work is ongoing. The Cockrell team just tested an EUV material designed by research partners UT Dallas and Johns Hopkins University, with more to come. With the help of a small printer, research can happen much faster.
Currently, the process can only pattern periodic structures, which is more useful in memory chips as well as photonics. The ultimate goal, still years in the future, is to create faster printers and more complex features for even smaller switches inside semiconductors, giving each chip more computing power.
"Beyond semiconductor manufacturing, the ability to pattern 3D nanostructures can find applications in medicine for nanodrugs, quantum computing or synthesizing novel materials," said Saurav Mohanty, a recent Ph.D. graduate student in the group and the first author of the study.
