EDITOR'S PAGE

Betting on risky R&D

Where do you go for seed money when you have an intriguing yet technically risky idea for a new, path-breaking technology? Unless there will be a probable return on investment in a couple of years, count out all but a few venture capitalists. The same goes for most corporate R&D funding mavens, who need the prospect of a tangible, not-too-long-term payoff and are uncomfortable with high-risk projects.

For the past decade, one source of technological financial aid has been the Advanced Technology Program (ATP). This branch of the National Institute of Standards and Technology has provided early-stage investments in the private sector to "develop innovative technologies that promise significant commercial payoffs and benefits for the nation." ATP's annual awards competition doles out millions of dollars for innovative R&D to U.S. companies and other organizations that otherwise could not find funding for those projects. Michael Baum, an ATP spokesperson, says that the 2000 competition has attracted 417 applicants, with 113 from the electronics and photonics category. This year's results will be announced in early fall, rewarding those entrants who, as Baum puts it, "are laying the technology foundation for economic benefit."

Several recent contest winners have come from the chipmaking community, including KLA-Tencor and Dow Chemical. ATMI was one of 37 proposals selected last year for what the company's principal investigator on the project, Frank DiMeo, calls a "MEMS-based process control gas sensor. We want to actually start looking at the gas-phase chemistry that's coming out of semiconductor manufacturing tools."

The three-year project will receive ATP funds equivalent to roughly half of the $3.77 million that ATMI estimates it needs to complete the work. DiMeo says the project "would not exist without ATP money in our company. Before we applied for it, we had six months of internal 'let's-take-a-look-see' money. At the end of that time, it was decided that it was too far term, too high risk to be internally funded. The ATP funding resurrected it." IntelliSense and MIT will assist in the research, although ATP program manager Michael Schen characterizes their participation as providing "some key technical pieces to the total project puzzle, but not a lot of pieces."

DiMeo explains the project's three main challenges. "The first is sensor material development. We need to come up with actual solid-state materials that will react with fluorine and fluorine-containing compounds but not react so much that they dissolve or passivate themselves. The second step is coming up with a MEMS platform on which to put those materials. The third step is the chemimetrics, the analysis. How do you take all these seemingly random data from all these sensor heads and collate those data into a final sensor signal that you can use either as an on-off or a go/no-go?"

DiMeo cites several potential ways that these tiny real-time process control sensors could improve chamber clean systems. "You get to reduce the amount of cleaning agents that you use to begin with ... and the amount that you have to clean up and abate. You improve your process time — if you're not overetching, then that's more time you can use to actually run your tool. You can extend or minimize the amount of damage you do per clean, so you can extend your preventive maintenance cycles. Since there are restrictions on how much chemicals or cleaning gas you have at a given site, you can get more cleaning from a single tank of gas."

The sensor arrays DiMeo envisions might be consumable items about a square centimeter in size, which would include 50 or more micromachined sensors. "It would possibly look like a Baratron pressure gauge," he notes. "We want to make it as familiar to folks as possible." Why not employ RF, optical spectroscopy, or other existing analytical techniques instead of the seemingly exotic approach pursued by DiMeo and his team? He replies: "We're pursuing MEMS not because it's a novelty, but because we feel it's a necessity for the success of this project."

For more information on ATP's awards competition and its other programs, go to http://www.atp.nist.gov.

Tom Cheyney
Editor

tom.cheyney@cancom.com
http://www.micromagazine.com

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