Plasmas in the semiconductor industry: modern trends, opportunities and diversity

Abstract:
The semiconductor industry is moving towards ever increasing densities and ever decreasing feature sizes. This was kicked off 40 years ago, by two international initiatives: Sematech in the USA and JESSI in the European Union. Those initiatives have lasted for around 10 years. After that, the technology was mature, and industry hardly needed the input of academia for solving their technical challenges in the plasma domain.

In recent years, since the moment that feature sizes came below 10 nm, a revival of the field has been taking place. For example: vertical etching angle specifications ask for side wall angles between 89.6 and 90 degrees, anisotropy has been approaching and now exceeds 100, etc. This has evoked a new need of industry for input from plasma physics, sheath physics, fluid dynamics and surface physics and chemistry in these size regimes (Knudsen flow, single atom reactions, etc). Recently, the USA launched the CHIPS act, a package of 45 G$ for semiconductor processing technology.

Europe has a similar CHIPS-package. In the presentation the needs of modern-day semiconductor processing will be highlighted, and we will also try to show how we, as people in academia, can cater to that need while at the meantime performing cutting edge fundamental science. One of the needs of the industry, but also of academia, is diversity. We need a well-trained workforce with a diverse composition.

TU/e has embarked on a course of increasing the diversity in the academic population. With that strategy, for instance, the fraction of female staff in tenured academia increased from 2 % to 35 % in 6 years in the physics department. We will describe the vital steps that have contributed to this spectacular shift.