(Press-News.org)
Johns Hopkins researchers have discovered new materials and a new process that could advance the ever-escalating quest to make smaller, faster and affordable microchips used across modern electronics—in everything from cellphones to cars, appliances to airplanes.
The team of scientists has discovered how to create circuits that are so small they’re invisible to the naked eye using a process that is both precise and economical for manufacturing.
The findings are published today in the journal Nature Chemical Engineering.
“Companies have their roadmaps of where they want to be in 10 to 20 years and beyond,” said Michael Tsapatsis, a Bloomberg Distinguish Professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at Johns Hopkins University. “One hurdle has been finding a process for making smaller features in a production line where you irradiate materials quickly and with absolute precision to make the process economical.”
The advanced lasers required for imprinting on the miniscule formats already exist, Tsapatsis added, but researchers needed new materials and new processes to accommodate ever smaller microchips.
Microchips are flat pieces of silicon with imprinted circuitries that execute basic functions. During production, manufacturers coat silicon wafers with a radiation-sensitive material to create a very fine coating called a “resist.” When a beam of radiation is pointed at the resist, it sparks a chemical reaction that burns details into the wafer, drawing patterns and circuitry.
However, the higher-powered radiation beams that are needed to carve out ever-smaller details on chips do not interact strongly enough with traditional resists.
Previously, researchers from Tsapatsis’s lab and the Fairbrother Research Group at Johns Hopkins found that resists made of a new class of metal-organics can accommodate that higher-powered radiation process, called “beyond extreme ultraviolet radiation” (B-EUV), which has the potential to make details smaller than the current standard size of 10 nanometers. Metals like zinc absorb the B-EUV light and generate electrons that cause chemical transformations needed to imprint circuit patterns on an organic material called imidazole.
This research marks one of the first times scientists have been able to deposit these imidazole-based metal-organic resists from solution at silicon-wafer scale, controlling their thickness with nanometer precision. To develop the chemistry needed to coat the silicon wafer with the metal-organic materials, the team combined experiments and models from Johns Hopkins University, East China University of Science and Technology, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Soochow University, Brookhaven National Laboratory and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The new methodology, which they call chemical liquid deposition (CLD), can be precisely engineered and lets researchers quickly explore various combinations of metals and imidazoles.
“By playing with the two components (metal and imidazole), you can change the efficiency of absorbing the light and the chemistry of the following reactions. And that opens us up to creating new metal-organic pairings,” Tsapatsis said. “The exciting thing is there are at least 10 different metals that can be used for this chemistry, and hundreds of organics.”
The researchers have started experimenting with different combinations to create pairings specifically for B-EUV radiation, which they say will likely be used in manufacturing in the next 10 years.
“Because different wavelengths have different interactions with different elements, a metal that is a loser in one wavelength can be a winner with the other,” Tsapatsis said. “Zinc is not very good for extreme ultraviolet radiation, but it’s one of the best for the B-EUV.”
Authors include Yurun Miao, Kayley Waltz, and Xinpei Zhou from Johns Hopkins University; Liwei Zhuang, Shunyi Zheng, Yegui Zhou, and Heting Wang from East China University of Science and Technology; Mueed Ahmad and J. Anibal Boscoboinik from Brookhaven National Laboratory; Qi Liu from Soochow University; Kumar Varoon Agrawal from École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne; and Oleg Kostko from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
END
-With images-
Durham University scientists have completed one of the largest quality verification programmes ever carried out on superconducting materials, helping to ensure the success of the world’s biggest fusion energy experiment ITER.
Their findings, published in Superconductor Science and Technology, shed light not only on the quality of the wires themselves but also on how to best test them, providing crucial knowledge for scientists to make fusion energy a reality.
Fusion (the process that powers the Sun) has long been described as the holy grail of clean energy. It offers the promise of a virtually limitless power source with no carbon emissions ...
The latest survey from the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC), the fourth of its kind, confirms that Candidozyma auris (formerly Candida auris) continues to spread quickly across European hospitals, posing a serious threat to patients and healthcare systems. Case numbers are rising, outbreaks are growing in scale, and several countries report ongoing local transmission. The findings highlight the importance of early detection and control of transmission to avoid widespread rapid dissemination.
Candidozyma auris (C. auris) is a ...
Recent research suggests that many of the Bronze Age people buried in Seddin, Germany, were not locals but came from outside the region. While archaeologists had previously uncovered artefacts from other parts of Europe around Seddin, this new study reveals that people themselves travelled and settled in Seddin.
This is the first bioarchaeological investigation on human skeletal remains from the Seddin area. While studying archaeological artefacts can reveal trade and exchange between different areas, it cannot determine whether this was accompanied by human travel. This new study sheds light on how people ...
In the Cretaceous period, Earth was plagued by widespread volcanic activity, oceanic oxygen depletion events, and mass extinctions. Fossils from that era remain and continue to give scientists clues as to what the climate may have looked like in different regions.
Now, researchers in China have examined some of them: dinosaur eggs found at the Qinglongshan site in the Yunyang Basin in central China. This is the first time that dinosaur eggs have been dated using carbonate uranium-lead (U-Pb) dating. The team published their results in Frontiers in Earth Science.
“We show that these dinosaur eggs were deposited roughly 85 million years ago, ...
Vibrations are everywhere—from the hum of machinery to the rumble of transport systems. Usually, these random motions are wasted and dissipated without producing any usable work. Recently, scientists have been fascinated by “ratchet systems” which are mechanical systems that rectify chaotic vibrations into directional motion. In biology, molecular motors achieve this feat within living cells to drive the essential processes by converting random molecular collisions into purposeful motions. However, at a large scale, these ratchet systems have always relied on built-in asymmetry, such as gears or ...
A landmark study led by the University of Sydney has found no evidence that family-based early obesity prevention programs, such as home visits from health professionals or community parent groups, improve overall body mass index (BMI) in young children.
Published in The Lancet, the study was led by Dr Kylie Hunter from the Faculty of Medicine and Health as part of the TOPCHILD collaboration with multiple scientists including those at the University Medical Center Rostock and Flinders University.
Early weight is a strong predictor of future weight ...
Tsukuba, Japan—The rapid rise of social media has enabled real-time interaction among users, accelerating and complicating the ways emotions influence human behavior. Yet the specific mechanisms through which emotions are transmitted and tied to viewer responses, particularly in settings where video and viewer comments are synchronized, remain poorly understood.
Grounded in the Emotions as Social Information (EASI) theory, which argues that emotional expressions function as vital social signals, the research team examined more than 50,000 barrage comments. ...
New research from the University of Sydney’s Charles Perkins Centre has found that genes play an active role in shaping the bacteria found in our gut, questioning the idea that gut health is influenced only by diet.
The gut microbiome is increasingly seen as vital to overall health, with Australia's gut health supplement industry valued at over $400 million in 2024.
“After decades of research linking the gut microbiome to almost every chronic disease, it may seem like we’re all ...
Research led by Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine and the Malawi-Liverpool-Wellcome Programme shows that over half of hospital patients with breathlessness had died within a year of admission (51%), as opposed to just 26% of those without the symptom.
Most of these patients had more than one condition that cause breathlessness, including pneumonia, anaemia, heart failure and TB.
The findings demonstrate the importance of integrated, patient-centred care, researchers say, to tackle the burden of high mortality ...
Summary
Led by Assistant Professor Kou Li, a research group in Chuo University, Japan, has developed a synergetic strategy among non-destructive terahertz (THz)–infrared (IR) photo-monitoring techniques and ultrabroadband sensitive imager sheets toward demonstrating in-line realtime multi-scale quality inspections of pharmaceutical agent pills, with a recent paper publication in Light: Science & Applications.
While non-destructive in-line monitoring at manufacturing sites is essential for ...
