Hybridizing 3D nanoprinting and etching for producing Faraday lithography

Moore’s Law predicts ongoing critical dimension (CD) shrinking in integrated circuits, pushing lithographic processes to their limits. Traditional methods (EUVL, EBL, and NIL) face challenges like either low throughput or high costs. Here we introduce a novel hybrid approach, coined Faraday lithography (FL), which uses electric fields for precisely printing aerosol nanoparticles and subsequently etch away the rest of materials for patterning. The printing technique achieves a minimum line-width of 14 nm and is experimentally proven for wafer-scale fabrication. The printed metal features served as hard masks, realizing considerable reduction in CDs. One example for this is that we obtained straight lines of excellent LER with a width of only 1/10 to that of groove (space of line/space pattern) patterns, which were made from the lithographic processes. We also show that the FL can expand the patterns from 1D to 3D. This promising solution is therefore expected to advance semiconductor technologies and to even break boundaries set by the current mainstream lithography.