Lithographically induced self-assembly techniques for advanced electronic device fabrication

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The semiconductor industry has achieved a steady and tremendous growth in performance for more than 40 years, leading to the pervasiveness of electronics in our daily lives. But this industry is now facing three key challenges: 1) the tremendous amount of heat that is generated by electronic chips now sets serious limits to their continued miniaturization; 2) the choice of materials for pursuing the miniaturization trend leads to major issues with material properties, for example brittleness and heat dissipation issues; 3) the microprocessor architecture is now evolving towards the integration of several cores on a single silicon chip, thus requiring very challenging connections between segments of a microprocessor and between the microprocessors and other components of a computer. This led to the development of new materials and of innovative 3-dimensional and/or optoelectronic connections. Over the next 5 to 10 years, the industry needs innovative low power devices capable of extremely high speeds and these devices must be compatible with the current CMOS technology in order to capitalize on the massive manufacturing capacity currently available. Single electron transistors are very promising for addressing these issues, but they need highly advanced fabrication techniques for manufacturing; these techniques are now seriously challenged by physical limits at the scale of the nanometre. Self-assembled nanostructures such as carbon nanotubes that could be used in these and other nanoelectronic devices suffer from different problems, many related to the need to accurately position the nanotubes in an electronic circuit, and others related to the challenge of taking the fabrication processes out of the laboratory and into the manufacturing environment. This research program will explore hybrid approaches which leverage sophisticated nanolithography with simpler self-assembly techniques for producing nanostructures such as carbon nanotubes and metallic dots and accurately controlling their location in devices and circuits, in order to exploit their exceptional electrical, mechanical and thermal properties, and eventually to increase the performance of advanced electronic circuits.