Nanotechnology can be seen to already have an impact on IC processing, no matter how it is defined. Nanomanipulators can be used for a variety of tasks in investigating nanostructures. An emerging application is the probing of individual transistors at the contact level anywhere on a die. As downscaling continues its inexorable march with the increasingly strong optical and other processing proximity effects, the ability to collect IV data from individual transistors anywhere in the circuit is becoming a valuable tool for failure analysis, yield enhancement, reliability, process integration, and time to market. The talk will discuss current capabilities and a roadmap to improve the productivity and capabilities of nanoprobing technology. In the longer term, nanotechnology's impact will not be on characterization and testing, but on processing itself. The real promise of nanotechnology is unprecedented process control of all phases of fabrication. An approach to atomically precise manufacturing will be presented that could enable the fabrication of Si or Si/Ge devices where dopant atoms can be precisely placed and the dimensions and control of those dimensions are limited only by the crystal lattice and its reconstruction due to surface or lattice strain. This fabrication technology could be used to produce ultra-scaled CMOS or advanced device technology.

Date Published: 13 March 2006
PDF: 7 pages
Proc. SPIE 6156, Design and Process Integration for Microelectronic Manufacturing IV, 615610 (13 March 2006); doi: 10.1117/12.659558

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 6156:
Design and Process Integration for Microelectronic Manufacturing IV
Alfred K. K. Wong; Vivek K. Singh, Editor(s)