Patterning and templating for nanoelectronics

The semiconductor industry will soon be launching 32 nm complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) technology node using 193 nm lithography patterning technology to fabricate microprocessors with more than 2 billion transistors. To ensure the survival of Moore's law, alternative patterning techniques that offer advantages beyond conventional top-down patterning are aggressively being explored. It is evident that most alternative patterning techniques may not offer compelling advantages to succeed conventional top-down lithography for silicon integrated circuits, but alternative approaches may well indeed offer functional advantages in realising next-generation information processing nanoarchitectures such as those based on cellular, bioinsipired, magnetic dot logic, and crossbar schemes. This paper highlights and evaluates some patterning methods from the Center on Functional Engineered Nano Architectonics in Los Angeles and discusses key benchmarking criteria with respect to CMOS scaling.