Aaron Hand

Will Nanoimprint Actually Get Its Day in the Sun?
March 3, 2008

The Molecular Imprints folks seem to have very bright outlooks on their future lately – they speak in a way that is more upbeat than I’ve heard them in the past, like they’re finally really getting somewhere in the semiconductor industry. “The semiconductor industry is beginning, I think, to pick up a lot of interest,” CEO Mark Melliar-Smith beamed. “If you look at the presentations that are going on at SPIE… we’ve got Toshiba, Hewlett-Packard, Samsung, IBM and Seagate. It’s a real who’s who of memory and technology companies. And it’s a very impressive list.”

And now, of course, there’s Sematech. When I had this conversation with the folks at Molecular Imprints the week before SPIE to get an embargoed pre-briefing of their Imprio 300 release, Melliar-Smith asked me a couple times during the conversation to stay tuned with regard to coming announcements about new CMOS partnerships. I guess one of those that I so wish he could’ve told me about at the time was the news that came down the wires Tuesday afternoon at SPIE about Sematech purchasing Molecular Imprints’ latest and greatest nanoimprint tool. No wonder they sounded so upbeat.

The goal of getting a Step and Flash Imprint Lithography (S-FIL) machine over to Albany is to demonstrate its feasibility for CMOS production applications at the 32 nm node and below. The fact that Sematech is willing to finally take this step is quite a validating move with regard to MII’s efforts.

For quite some time, no matter how good the resolution and cost-of-ownership story may be, there has been concern voiced by the industry about such important considerations as defects, overlay, CD uniformity, and more. MII has made progress in these areas, but the work at Albany NanoTech signals increasing industry investment that could give the technology the final push to manufacturing.

But meanwhile, I don’t want to let the Seagate mention slip by on that earlier-referenced who’s who list. With Seagate as a customer of Molecular Imprints, we’re talking about hard disk drives, where nanoimprint is an imminent reality in their scaling efforts. This is an important point because the other next-generation lithography (NGL) technologies are not able to leverage the learning that comes with practical experience in another big market like this. It’s something that will keep the imprint technology at MII and other suppliers viable and improving.

Seagate and other disk drive companies (MII has sold five tools to that industry) do not use the Imprio 250 for nanoimprint, but rather the 1100 because they print the whole disk at once. For this reason, they don’t have the tight overlay requirements of the CMOS industry, but the disk drive industry is nonetheless very synergistic to CMOS, Melliar-Smith said. And in fact, there are many respects where the technology being demonstrated is quite awe-inspiring. Patterned media, where they can no longer use magnetic confinement, now has to etch the individual memory elements – every single bit on a magnetic disk. On a terabyte-size disk, then, which is expected around the 2010 timeframe, that means 10 trillion sub-30 nm columns. “It sort of makes the idea of doing 30 nm a few billion contacts for ICs in perspective,” Melliar-Smith noted.

Nonetheless, regardless of what kinds of results the nanoimprint folks might be able to produce, they continue to face perception issues. Many people in the industry shrink away at the mention of 1x technology, and are very concerned about defect issues. I mentioned in passing to a few people at the conference about the momentum nanoimprint lithography seems to be getting. Every time, they conceded that the technology sounded interesting, but they just couldn’t get past the idea of it being a 1x technique.

As I write this on my way back home from SPIE, I’m stuck in a holding pattern over O’Hare, circling over Chicago during weather delays that are all too common here. But I’m content in the knowledge that I don’t have to make a connecting flight, like so many of the poor saps seated around me. I can’t help but relate it to nanoimprint, which has been circling around in its own holding pattern – look at that single-digit resolution (but it’s a 1x technology), look at how straightly and smoothly those lines are reproduced (but look at how well those defects are reproduced, too) – inching a little closer to its approach all the while. With any luck, they will touch down soon. For me, my ears are popping, so surely we’re almost there.

Epilogue: We landed sooner rather than later… Then sat on the tarmac for a half hour, waiting for a gate to open up. Hopefully, nanoimprint doesn’t face a similar fate.

Posted by Aaron Hand on March 3, 2008 | Comments (5)