This article as been adapted from this Berkeley Lab press release.
Presented by R&D Magazine, the R&D 100 Awards, which are selected by an independent panel of judges, recognize the year’s 100 most innovative and disruptive technology products from industry, academia, and government-sponsored research. Established in 1963, the R&D 100 Awards is the only science and technology awards competition that recognizes new commercial products, technologies, and materials for their technological significance that are available for sale or license.
A team that included the Foundry’s former Nanofabrication Facility Director Stefano Cabrini and Foundry user Daniel Staaks developed an innovative photomask absorber material with tunable optical properties that enables high resolution, single-exposure patterning using Extreme Ultraviolet Lithography (EUVL) for fabricating tomorrow’s computer chips today.
Manufacturers of devices like smartphones or computers are continually trying to scale down the components that go onto each system-on-a-chip (SOC) in order to add performance and power without significantly raising costs. This downscaling is achieved using photolithography, which is the approach that enables high-volume manufacturing by rapidly copying the layout of a pattern from a photomask onto a target wafer. The technique is limited by the size of the wavelengths, and so downscaling has required increasingly shorter wavelengths.
A new photolithography technology called extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUVL), which uses extremely small-wavelength light and is capable of patterning very small features, has recently been deployed at the largest chip makers, but one challenge of the new technology is the thickness of the mask pattern that is required to ensure typical absorber materials are dark enough to sufficiently block the light. Berkeley Lab scientists have created a new, darker absorber material, chromium-antimony, that results in high-quality nanometer films and can be patterned with a high degree of control and resolution, down to 5 nanometers. The invention promises high resolution, single exposure, and cost-effective patterning for the fabrication of logic and memory chips.
In a second award, a team of Foundry users led by Wei Tong developed a unique cathode material that uses a layered- rocksalt intergrown structure, combining the high capacity of lithium-rich metal oxides, fast kinetics of a cation-ordered layered structure, along with structural stability of a cation-disordered rocksalt structure. Their material has been shown to offer high capacity, fast charging time and energy transfer, and superior cycling and thermal stability. In addition, the cost for raw materials to produce layered-rocksalt intergrown electrodes is estimated to be significantly less than that of lithium-rich layered oxides when expensive cobalt is completely replaced by cost-effective iron. This innovation exemplifies a new battery electrode design concept and opens up a new class of high-performance intergrown cathode materials.
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These materials were two of three technologies from the Berkeley Lab that have won a 2021 R&D 100 award, representing innovations for memory and logic chips, next-generation batteries, and radiation detection and mapping.
Read the full press release to learn more.
