Atomic Calligraphy, A Fab-on-a-Chip Approach to Lithography

The traditional approach to keeping pace with Moore's Law has largely been improving conventional semiconductor foundry technology. Here we present an alternative approach called Fab-On-a-Chip where conventional foundry machines are used to create nano-fabrication machines, including deposition, sensing, and lithography tools. Chip based versions of all these tools will be touched on, but the focus of the talk will be a lithography technique called atomic calligraphy. Atomic calligraphy uses MEMS based nano-positioners to move a plate with potentially sub-nanometer resolution. Single apertures, arrays of apertures, or complex designs can be milled into the plate and used to mask depositions. Though serial, atomic calligraphy can achieving large throughputs because it can be scaled to tens of thousands of devices fabricating in parallel. We will show examples of nanoscale structures made with atomic calligraphy including arrays of structures and structures covering a large area. We will also discuss methods used to prevent the clogging of apertures, to push the resolution limits to sub-nanometer, and to array devices to achieve large throughput.