The semiconductor industry is a rapidly growing industry expected to reach over one trillion dollars in the next few years. As device dimensions continue to shrink, the industry relies more heavily on lithography, a critical patterning step that is expensive, complex, and prone to misalignment errors which are detrimental to device yield. Area-selective deposition (ASD) is a bottom-up patterning technique that provides an opportunity to complement lithography and reduce misalignment errors during device manufacturing, thereby reducing cost and complexity while improving yield. ASD exploits chemical differences on a pre-patterned substrate to deposit film on a desired growth region without depositing on an adjacent non-growth region. Many successful ASD processes have been developed using a wide range of metals, dielectrics, and semiconductors, and these processes are often further improved with selective passivation and/or defect mitigation strategies. For example, inhibitors can selectively bind to one surface (e.g. dielectric vs. metal) to block growth on that surface, allowing selective deposition of liners or etch-resistant layers within the device. In this presentation, we provide an overview of inhibitor-based ASD research efforts and applications in the field of semiconductors and discuss key challenges for future development of ASD.
Rachel grew up in Pennsylvania, where she studied Chemistry and Spanish at Washington & Jefferson College. She then moved down to North Carolina to enjoy the warmer weather, receiving her PhD in Chemical Engineering from North Carolina State University in 2022. Her thesis work focused on thin film deposition under Gregory Parsons. During her PhD, she completed internships at Micron and imec (a semiconductor research consortium in Belgium), where she worked on area-selective deposition for nanopatterns and EUV resists. She joined Lam Research in August 2022 as a process engineer under Dennis Hausmann, where she continues to work on area-selective deposition for semiconductor logic and memory devices. She currently has eleven peer reviewed papers and three patents pending. She married her best friend, Trevor, this past summer (thus adding the “de Castro” to her name). Outside of work she enjoys traveling, skiing, soccer, and outdoors adventures.