A little over a decade ago Dr. Qinghuang Lin from IBM came to NIST with concerns about the performance of their chemically amplified photoresist systems. At the time, the thickness of these polymer based films was starting to push below 200 nm and there were significant concerns about deviations in their performance / resolution as the film thickness continued to drop. This was a time when in the scientific literature that there was significant debate over deviations in the glass transition temperature for polymer films thinner than 100 nm. The lithographic community was worried about the ramifications that this might have on the patterning resolution of their critical photoresist formulations. In response, through a DARPA grant with IBM, NIST helped to develop a suite of tools that could quantify both the spatial and temporal extend of photoacid reaction and diffusion in these thin film photoresist tools, thereby establishing quantitative platform to understand thin film effects on photoresist performance. This was a seminal catalyst for the NIST research programs, shifting our focus from simple transition effects in thin film to more complicated transport properties. In the decade and a half that followed, NIST has leveraged these tools to address transport problems in confined polymer films and interfaces in not just chemically amplified photoresists, but also water transport in polymer films and interfaces for membranes and composites, viscous flow in nanoimprint lithography, ion diffusion in polyelectrolyte interfaces, and even the freeze-drying processes used to preserve proteins in viscous sugars and alcohols. In this presentation, I will review several of these advances and highlight some of the general observations that we have learned about transport in confined polymers that was spawned by Dr. Qninghuang Lin’s initial inquiry.

Transport in confined polymer films: How chemically amplified photoresists at IBM spawned a decade of thin film transport research at NIST

256th National Meeting (2018)

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