Development and commercialisation of resist technologies for nanofabrication

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"For the last 40 years, the semiconductor industry has been producing increasingly powerful, power efficient, and affordable electronic devices mainly due to innovative developments in lithography (semiconductor patterning) equipment and materials. Improvements in photolithography (PL) and electron beam lithography (EBL) equipments have delivered progressively higher resolution images with every generation. As part of the lithography process, 'resists' are used as materials that physically record exposure patterns on a silicon wafer as imaged from a mask. To realize the improvements in photolithography equipments, resist performance must keep pace.Sci-Tron Ltd are developing resists which can be tailored to meet the challenges presented by all forms of lithography. This Innovate UK proposal is to build our capacity to supply the PL and EBL markets. The testing we have performed suggests we have products that can produce a major competitive advantage to many UK companies which use lithography. Developing the best business model for this diverse market-place will be a key target of this project. Currently we can produce resists in laboratory conditions at a gram scale.During this project, we will develop a flexible manufacturing process which aims to produce a catalogue of resists to satisfy a large number of potential end-users that will have diverse needs, diverse scale and who may use either EBL or PL as a writing tool. For some resists we will need to scale-up and maintain low cost; for other bespoke resists small scale will be sufficient, but with the capacity to produce on demand and with a high profit on small amounts of material. In partnership with the University of Manchester (UoM), this 18 months industrial research project will help us developing manufacturing capability which provides flexibility to switch between different resists while maintaining the required quality control.Key project activities include;1) design and build a flexible manufacturing facility capable of a 20kg per annum throughput of resist, and capable of switching between different resist formulations to meet specific end-user requirements,2) complete application specific testing with key partners to develop resist materials to TRL6, and3) develop a complete business plan detailing the resources, distribution and supply chain required, and the value proposition, team composition and expected financial outcomes for Sci-Tron."