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Spin-on-carbon (SoC) has been developed for use as the bottom layer of a multi-level patterning stack to improve pattern transfer capability from any photoresist.
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Overview: Spin-on carbon (SoC) is becoming increasingly attractive as the bottom layer of multi-level stacks used to enable high aspect ratio transfer from thin resist layers during plasma etching. Fullerene based SoC materials outperform existing state of the art materials across several critical performance metrics, whilst maintaining the advantages of spin-on materials over CVD deposited carbon. The high etch resistance of the fullerene based material allows high aspect ratio plasma etching from a very thin patterned film. Our fullerenes have extremely low levels of aliphatic carbon-hydrogen, and are low in hydrogen content even in comparison to the aromatic polymers typically used in this application. This has been shown to be critical to solve severe pattern deformation ("wiggling") of features below 20nm defined in spin-on-carbon hardmasks (or organic planarising layers), during the plasma etch step to transfer of the features to the underlying layer. In addition fullerene SoC films have high temperature stability, exceeding 450 °C and are reasonable transparent to wavelengths above 300 nm improving alignment capabilities. Irresistible Materials' fullerene derivative based spin-on-carbon (SoC) has been developed for use as the bottom layer of a multi-level patterning stack to improve pattern transfer capability from any photoresist.