Chris Bencher: New lithography technologies gain a foothold

Sidewall-spacer double patterning has enabled accelerated scaling of NAND flash through three generations beyond the capabilities of conventional immersion lithography. Double, and even quadruple patterning integration schemes are not just useful for extending immersion lithography, but will ultimately be combined with EUV lithography to reach even smaller sub-resolution features.

Chris Bencher is a distinguished member of the technical staff working in the CTO office of Applied Materials on path-finding and commercialization of advanced-patterning techniques.

During his 20 years at Applied Materials, Bencher has directed research and development in antireflective coatings, carbon hardmasks, double-patterning integration, and directed self-assembly. He has been a leading advocate for the capabilities of sidewall-spacer double patterning, publishing annually and working with designers and electronic design automation (EDA) companies to further extend the self-aligned double patterning (SADP) technique for logic.

Bencher has 50 US semiconductor manufacturing patents, 20 in the field of patterning techniques, including many of the earliest on SADP process flows. He participates on the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors (ITRS) lithography roadmap team, and co-chairs the Alternative Lithography conference at SPIE Advanced Lithography, where he also serves on the symposium executive committee.

Before joining the semiconductor industry in the early 90s, Bencher graduated from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and the University of California, Berkeley with degrees in Materials Science.