Will Nanoimprint Actually Get Its Day in the Sun?

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.