Modern semiconductor microchips are the brain of the Information Age and the engine of new knowledge-based economy. These ubiquitous and sophisticated microchips have fundamentally changed how we live, work, learn, communicate, do business, and interact with government. The steady increase in computing power resulting from these microchips, coupled with big data and advances in algorithms, has ushered in a new artificial intelligence (AI) era in the last few years, with stunning performances of some artificial intelligence computing systems, e.g. AlphaGo by DeepMind. Polymers have played a crucial role in enabling the ever smaller, faster and cheaper and more efficient transistors for over fifty (50) years. In this talk, I will discuss a class of polymers called silicon-containing polymers as an enabling material platform for modern microchip manufacturing. I will present synthesis of silicon-containing polymers and their applications as three types of electronic materials: (1) photosensitive polymeric materials, called photoresists, used to “print” modern microchips; (2) on-chip electrical insulators prepared either by a dry chemical vapor deposition or a wet spin-on process; (3) photo-patternable on-chip low dielectric constant electrical insulators. These silicon-containing polymers have been commercialized and adopted for high-volume manufacturing of several generations of microchips. They have also enabled new chip-making technologies that are indispensable for making some of the most popular electronic devices in the world today.

Industrial polymer research for nanoelectronics

256th National Meeting (2018)

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