High Throughput Platform to Meet Covarying Materials Manufacturing Design Criteria for Block Copolymer Nanolithography

Methodologies and tools for the accelerated discovery and design of materials for use in manufacturing have been transformed over the past decade through the combination and integration of experiment, theory, and computation. Here we build on the integration of experiment and molecular simulation to specify design rules for block copolymer (BCP) materials, for use in the directed self-assembly (DSA) of ultra-high resolution lithographic patterns for semiconductor manufacturing, and report on a high throughput synthesis and characterization platform for discovery and subsequent optimization of BCP materials for this application over a range of pattern dimensions. The design rules are agnostic to specific polymer chemistries and are derived from equilibrium (thermodynamic) and non-equilibrium (dynamic) predictive physics-based models that were validated by comparison to one of a kind quantitative experiments using the only BCP material and DSA process that have been successfully implemented in an industry-relevant format, at one serendipitously-found pattern dimension, and interrogated by state-of-the-art inspection tools so as to be known to satisfy manufacturing constraints. In a departure from conventional materials development, multiple co-varying properties must be simultaneously optimized in the BCP materials, and materials of different chemistry and composition must be developed for each pattern dimension over the desired range. A key advance to develop a family of different materials to realize these objectives is the design and implementation of a high throughput discovery-oriented synthesis and characterization platform using interchangeable polymer components to explore a large and complex parameter space to find possible combinations of components that satisfy the design rules at different pattern dimensions. The large data sets acquired from the high throughput methodologies then allow rapid convergence on the synthesis of BCP materials for specific objectives in the application space.