The mass production of integrated circuits (commonly known as ‘microchips’ or simply ‘chips’) is a key driver for modern computational advances. Chip manufacturing requires a process called photolithography to template the intricate patterns of electronic components. This process uses patterns of light to selectively pattern a material known as a photoresist. New extreme ultraviolet (EUV) based lithography methods are poised to enable more powerful chips than ever before by packing higher volumes of smaller electronic components onto a single chip, making new photoresists essential to reaching the desired small features sizes.

This Designing Materials to Revolutionize Our Future (DMREF) project combines chemistry, processing, and computation to design new photoresists to enable high-volume EUV lithography for chip manufacturing. This will be achieved by understanding how the local molecular structure of polymer-based photoresists defines the patterning at nanoscale dimensions, and how this translates to manufacturing outcomes. This interdisciplinary effort will bring together scientists and engineers from academia and the Air Force Research Lab with expertise in synthesizing materials, characterizing their physical properties, modeling their behavior with simulations, and predicting new materials with improved properties using AI.

The new materials and patterning methodologies developed in this project will broadly benefit the US by enabling advanced manufacturing of next-generation computer chips with applications ranging from personal electronics and health care monitoring to supercomputers and generative AI. This research will further be combined with K-12 outreach and student training to prepare the next generation STEM workforce.