The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency supported a University of Colorado-Boulder research team that discovered an approach on how to synthesize ultrathin materials at room temperature under the agency’s Local Control of Materials Synthesis program.DARPA said Wednesday the CU team demonstrated room-temperature deposition of silicon and gallium nitride and a capacity to etch specific materials that lead to spatial control in three dimensions that may help meet demands for smaller device architectures.
Personnel at the Naval Research Laboratory and National Institute of Standards and Technology have collaborated with CU on the university’s research that was featured at the 16th International Conference on Atomic Layer Deposition.
“Looking forward, the EE-ALD approach could serve not just as a tool for integrating incompatible materials but also more generally to build and etch device architectures at atomic scales, an increasingly important capability as circuit geometries shrink,†said Tyler McQuade, DARPA program manager.
DARPA noted CU has also developed a custom deposition chamber in a push to showcase industrial relevance and scalability of the EE-ALD process which can potentially deposit or etch films comprised of several materials on industrial-scale six-inch silicon wafers.
