Modern computer microprocessor chips are marvels of engineering complexity. For the current 45 nm technology node, there may be nearly a billion transistors on a chip barely 1 cm2 and more than 10 000 m of wiring connecting and powering these devices distributed over 9-10 wiring levels. This represents quite an advance from the first INTEL 4004B microprocessor chip introduced in 1971 with 10 μm minimum dimensions and 2 300 transistors on the chip! It has been disclosed that advanced microprocessor chips at the 32 nm node will have more than 2 billion transistors.1 For instance, Figure 1 shows a sectional 3D image of a 90 nm IBM microprocessor, containing several hundred million integrated devices and 10 levels of interconnect wiring, designated as the back-end-of-the-line (BEOL). Since the invention of microprocessors, the number of active devices on a chip has been exponentially increasing, approximately doubling every two years. This trend was first described in 1965 by Gordon Moore,2 although the original discussion suggested doubling the number of devices every year, and the phenomenon became popularly known as Moore’s Law. This progress has proven remarkably resilient and has persisted for more than 50 years. The enabler that has permitted these advances is known as scaling, that is, the reduction of minimum device dimensions by lithographic advances (photoresists, tooling, and process integration optimization) by ∼30% for each device generation.3 It allowed more active devices to be incorporated in a given area and improved the operating characteristics of the individual transistors. It should be emphasized that the earlier improvements in chip performance were achieved with very few changes in the materials used in the construction of the chips themselves. The increase of performance with scaling * Corresponding author. E-mail: gdubois@us.ibm.com. † IBM Almaden Research Center. ‡ Stanford University. Willi Volksen received his B.S. in Chemistry (magna cum laude) from New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology in 1972 and his Ph.D. in Chemistry/Polymer Science from the University of Massachusetts, Lowell, in 1975. He then joined the research group of Prof. Harry Gray/Dr. Alan Rembaum at the California Institute of Technology as a postdoctoral fellow and upon completion of the one-year appointment joined Dr. Rembaum at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory as a Senior Chemist in 1976. In 1977 Dr. Volksen joined the IBM Research Division at the IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose, CA, where he is an active research staff member in the Advanced Materials Group of the Science and Technology function.

Low dielectric constant materials.

SiO2-based xerogels are highly porous materials that may enhance the performance of microelectronic devices due to their extremely low dielectric constants (e=1.36–2.2). Conventional xerogel and aerogel manufacturing techniques include an expensive and hazardous supercritical drying step to deposit crack free, high porosity films. Ambient drying techniques have recently been developed and in this article, we discuss how the process parameters in the ambient drying process affect the properties of a spin-coated film. Successful spin-on deposition of highly porous (>70%), thick (>1 μm), crack-free, xerogel films was accomplished using a solvent saturated atmosphere during spinning and aging. The saturated atmosphere allowed for the isolation of each processing step and a better understanding of the effects of process variable changes. The film porosity was controlled by varying the extent of silylation (surface modification), the aging time, or the initial water/silane ratio. Fourier transform infrared spec...

Surface modified spin-on xerogel films as interlayer dielectrics

A multipurpose and ultra-compact nanoplasmonic wavelength filter based on stub structure in a metal-insulator-metal (MIM) waveguide is suggested and numerically investigated. A novel approach of connecting two stepped-like apertures to both input and output ports is applied to form Fabry-Perot (FP) cavities, which enabled the structure to act as a dual band-pass filter at wavelengths 1310 nm and 1550 nm. It is shown that the variation in cavities’ length allows to realize a long-wavelength cutoff filter, and cutoff wavelength can be easily tuned by adjusting the length of the cavities. Furthermore, it is revealed that increasing the gap between the stepped-like apertures and the cavities provides a triple band-pass at telecom wavelengths, e.g., 1267.5 nm, 1414.19 nm, and 1644.7 nm. The tunable broadband high-pass wavelength filter is then achieved while the lengths of stepped-like apertures and stub resonators are set to be identical. Finally, a tunable nearly perfect absorber can be obtained by varying the width of stub resonators. Therefore, because of functionality, size, as well as efficiency the proposed plasmonic filter may greatly contribute to miniaturization of next generation of photonic integrated circuits (PICs), and find applications in on-chip integration and wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) in optical communication systems.

/pdf/a-multipurpose-and-highly-compact-plasmonic-filter-based-on-1n9v1n734z.pdf

A Multipurpose and Highly-Compact Plasmonic Filter Based on Metal-Insulator-Metal Waveguides

National Nano Device Laboratories, Hsinchu 300, TaiwanOxygen plasma has been successfully utilized to remove the organic template in molecularly templated nanoporous silica ﬁlms.The resulting nanoporous silica ﬁlm has a high porosity and a surface roughness of less than 10 A. The hydrophilic ﬁlm can bemodiﬁed to be hydrophobic by reacting with hexamethyldisilazane~HMDS!. Reductive plasmas, such as hydrogen and ammoniaplasmas, have been applied to reduce the leakage current of the nanoporous silica ﬁlm without deteriorating the dielectricproperties. The dielectric constant of the silica ﬁlm can be reduced to 1.7 after an HMDS/H

Plasma Treatments of Molecularly Templated Nanoporous Silica Films

Smooth and micro/nano-structured fluorocarbon coatings are obtained by radio frequency (RF), 13.56 MHz, glow discharges fed with hexafluoropropylene oxide (C3F6O, HFPO) both in glow and in afterglow. It is shown that the extent of micro/nanostructuring, as well as the F/C ratio of the coatings, can be precisely tuned with both substrate position and deposition time. Nodular and “stone roses” morphological features are easily obtained, with good reproducibility, by controlling the plasma parameters. Both chemical and morphological features are shown to deeply affect film properties and, in turn, wetability, allowing a move from a hydrophobic behavior to a superhydrophobic one.

PECVD of Fluorocarbon Coatings from Hexafluoropropylene Oxide: Glow vs. Afterglow

Low dielectric-constant insulators for electronics applications

Handle everyday research tasks with reliable, citation-backed results

Your personal Research Agent to handle research tasks with citation-backed results

Popular Tasks used by Researchers

How can I help with your research?

Meet SciSpace

Get more enhanced response by uploading the PDFs you want me to reference.

No relevant PDFs in your library

SciSpace is the AI research assistant for academics. Run systematic literature reviews on 280M+ papers, and write papers with cited sources. Trusted by 1M+ students, PhDs & researchers.

SciSpace | AI for Research

Analyze PDFs

Code & Manuscripts

Funding & Grants

Literature & Patents

Medical & Clinical Data

Systematic Review

Visualize & Present

Web & Data

Build a Google Scholar-like website for your research.

Build a website

Create charts and images for your research

Create a Chart

Write a paper for submission to a journal

Draft a manuscript

Patent Search

Design eye-catching scientific posters in minutes.

Scientific Poster Generation

Systematic Literature Review

One task is running at the moment. Your messages will be shown right after.

Drag and drop or click here to browse

Loved by <highlight>1 million+</highlight> researchers

Extract a list of specific topics and their sources from unstructured text

Topics

Compare and analyze relevant papers that matches with your search

Papers

Get insights from PDFs and bookmarked papers from your library

My library

Recent searches

Try searching for:

Catch AI-generated content in scholarly and non-scholarly content

{ai} Detector

Ai Writer

Get PDF Summaries, highlighted text explanations 

Chat with PDF

Effortlessly create in-text citations and bibliographies in APA and 2,500 other formats

Citation generator

Get explanations, summaries, and answers on academic papers

Ease up your research workflow with {scispace}'s cohort of exciting AI tools

Elevate your academic writing skills and convey your ideas the way you want

Paraphraser

Explore our range of reading and writing tools

Your file is being prepared and should be ready in a few minutes. If it's a large file, it might take a bit longer. You can close this window, and we'll email you the file when it's done.

You have reached a maximum limit of <strong>{limit}</strong> columns in the table. Remove at least <strong>1</strong> column to add or create another one.

D.M. Smith

Author Tools

Chat about Author

Papers

Low dielectric-constant insulators for electronics applications