Abstract:
Lithography has been one of the key technological drivers for advancements in the semiconductor industry since its inception.  Richard Feynman in his now famous 1959 talk entitled “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom,” envisioned a world of atomically precise manufacturing that would fuel advancements in information storage, computing, and other fields, though he had only a few rudimentary concepts of how to achieve such a goal at the time.  Move forward to 2014 where the semiconductor industry routinely manufactures circuit elements that are below 40 nm in size and the data storage industry is poised to manufacture and sell bit patterned media with even smaller elements.  While we have achieved many of the feats Feynman originally envisioned in his original talk, there is still plenty of room at the bottom in 2-D and 3-D geometries that cannot yet be accessed in a manufacturable way.  The talk will start with an overview of lithography, its tools, and its materials, followed by a brief of history of patterning technology.  A short primer on the way lithographic materials and methods work will be discussed in this context.  The talk will then move on to present a view of current state-of-the art nanomanufacturing capabilities vis-à-vis optical, EUV, and e-beam lithography methods and materials and will highlight some of the challenges in moving lithography forward to even smaller length scales. We will conclude with a look at our ongoing work at Georgia Tech in developing materials and methods that can allow us to bridge the gap between current manufacturing capabilities and the dream of atomically precise manufacturing.
    
Biography:
Dr. Clifford L. Henderson is currently a Professor in the School of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology, with an additional appointment as an Adjunct Professor in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry at Georgia Tech.  Professor Henderson is also currently serving as the Functional Materials Program Director in the CMMI Division at the National Science Foundation.  He received his Bachelor of Science in Chemical Engineering with Highest Honors from the Georgia Institute of Technology and his Master of Science and Doctor of Philosophy in Chemical Engineering from The University of Texas at Austin.  He is an active member of a number of professional societies including the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE), The International Society for Optics and Photonics (SPIE), the American Chemical Society (ACS), and the American Vacuum Society (AVS). He serves in a variety of national leadership roles including being Past Chair of the Materials Engineering and Sciences Division, the current Chair of the Student Chapters Committee, and a member of the Executive Board of the Programming Committee of AIChE. He has received numerous awards for his work including an NSF CAREER Award, the inaugural Intel/STC Outstanding Lithography Researcher Award in 2012, and being named a SPIE Fellow in 2010 for his many years of work on issues related to lithography simulation, photoresist materials, and patterning processes.  Professor Henderson’s research group currently focuses on problems at the intersection of organic and polymeric materials science, nanomanufacturing, thin film science in a variety of application areas for advanced nanostructured materials including electronics, energy, and biotechnology.