Recent Progress and Remaining Challenges in Pattern Transfer Technologies for Advanced Chip Designs

Summary form only given. Even as Moore's law continues to drive "tiny technologies" through relentless scaling, the main technology driver for semiconductor chips has evolved from DRAMs to microprocessors to FPGAs. The underlying metrics have evolved from bits per chip and cost per bit for computers to functions per chip and cost per function for consumer products. The talk reviews the remarkable progress that has been made in enabling pattern transfer technologies, including mask design, lithography enhancements and precision etching, on the new 300 mm wafers for an increasingly wide variety of new materials. However, there is a cost associated with all this and the cost-benefit tradeoffs will almost certainly drive new inflections in the entire food chain, which the author tries to identify.