(iTers News) - Formerly known as Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, HSGT broke new ground in a microscopic nano-scale printing and lithography technology, laying out the ground work to break through current technical impasses facing the chip industry in patterning below 10 nanometer chip circuitry.

The nano-lithography technology also promises to open the way for hard disk drive, or HDD industry to create two times more bit storage spaces in a given space.

HSGT is a subsidiary of Western Digital Technology.

HGST Labs said that researchers have combined two innovative nanotechnologies -self-assembling molecules and nanoimprinting - to create large areas of dense patterns in only 10 nanometer-wide magnetic footprints (one nanometer is one billionth of a meter).

These patterned features are only about 50 atoms wide and some 100,000 times thinner than a human hair.

Tom Albrecht, HGST Fellow, spoke at SPIE Advanced Lithography 2013 conference in San Jose, CA., touching on the huge potentials of the nano-lithography technology that his team worked on in partnership with Austin, Texas-based Molecular Imprints Inc., to make dense patterns of magnetic islands in about 100,000 circular tracks required for disk drives.

Self-assembling molecules use hybrid polymers, called block copolymers. Hybrid polymers composed of segments that repel each other. Coated as a thin film on a properly prepared surface, the segments line up into perfect rows.



(Photo caption :Nano-lithography patterning by the courtesy of HGST)

The size of the polymer segments determines the row spacing. After polymer patterns are created, HGST team has applied a chip-making industry’s line doubling process to make the tiny features even smaller, creating two separate lines where one existed before.

The patterns are then converted into templates for nanoimprinting, a precision stamping process that transfers the nanometer-scale pattern onto a chip or disk substrate.

A key challenge proved to be preparing the original surface so the block copolymers form their patterns in the radial and circular paths necessary for rotating disk storage. HGST is the first to combine self-assembling molecules, line doubling and nanoimprinting to make rectangular features as small as 10 nanometers in such a circular arrangement.

"As creators of the original hard disk drive, we are proud to continue our heritage of innovation with today's nanotechnology advance," said Currie Munce, vice president, HGST Research. "The emerging techniques of self-assembling molecules and nanoimprinting utilized at the HGST Labs will have an enormous impact on nanoscale manufacturing, enabling bit-patterned media to become a cost-effective means of increasing data densities in magnetic hard disk drives before the end of the decade."

The nano-lithography technology has huge implications for the chip industry, too. It stands a chance to become a low-cost and easy-to-use alternative to the chip industry’s new generation of photolithography technology EUV, or extreme ultra violet light. The photolithography technology is to pattern fine chip circuitry on a silicon wafer using a set of photo masks and optical lens.

As the width of the chip circuitry relies on the wavelength of the light source, the chip industry has been on a look-out of a light source of a shorter wavelength. The industry is struggling to scale down the chip circuitry below 10nanometers, EUV is emerging an a commercial successor to today’s mainstream ArF immersion technology. Yet, EUV is painstakingly expensive and complex to implement. It is also a power-guzzler, because it takes a large laser generator to create EUV.

HGST nano-lithography achievements also come at a critical juncture for storage drives as cloud computing, social networking and mobility create an ever increasing amount of content that must be stored, managed and accessed efficiently.

The bit density of HGST's 10-nanometer pattern is double that of today's disk drives and lab tests show excellent initial read/write and data retention. When extended to an entire disk, the nanoimprinting process is expected to create more than a trillion discrete magnetic islands.

"We made our ultra-small features without using any conventional photolithography," Albrecht said. "With the proper chemistry and surface preparations, we believe this work is extendible to ever-smaller dimensions."

Because self-assembling molecules create repetitive patterns, researchers expect they will be best suited to making bit-patterned magnetic media for disk drives, uniformly spaced regions for computer memories, various wiring contacts and other periodic features of other types of semiconductor chips.

Nanoimprinting and self assembling molecules are also most easily introduced in defect-tolerant applications such as disk drives or memory, even as the industry works to perfect the technologies for more demanding applications

 

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