CHALLENGES TO MANUFACTURING SUBMICRON, ULTRA-LARGE SCALE INTEGRATED-CIRCUITS

The cost of manufacturing submicron, ultra-large-scale integration (ULSI) integrated circuits (ICs) is scaling upwards at least in inverse proportion to the downwards scaling of device feature sizes. These costs are driven by a parameter budget crisis associated with the technological and complexity limits of IC design and fabrication. This budget crisis is defined for technologies associated with patterning, mechanical control, thermal treatments, particulates and contamination, defects, electrical parameters and manufacturing. Competition on the production floor has put manufacturing in the role of a technology driver for setting R&D priorities for silicon ULSI. In this paper these priorities are identified and quantified, and the potential impact of some new research results is discussed. It is pointed out that the R&D agenda to deal with the ULSI manufacturing budget crisis is enormous, and the semiconductor industry cannot perform all of it. Since the time for transferring new developments into production tools and technologies is five to seven years, critical funding decisions need to be made now for ULSI manufacturing science breakthroughs by the turn of the century. © 1990 IEEE