Achievement

IGERT Trainee Erin Lennon was on a team led by Professor Craig Hawker that made a major contribution to the field of nanotechnology. One of the main limitations in the manufacture of integrated circuits is the difficult in scaling the photolithographic techniques currently used during fabrication of complementary metal oxide semiconductor transistors to below 30 nanometers. Traditional self-assembling approaches based on block copolymer lithography spontaneously yield nanometer-sized hexagonal structures, but these features are not consistent with the industry-standard rectilinear coordinate system. The UCSB team developed a modular and hierarchical self-assembly strategy, combining supramolecular assembly of hydrogen-bonding units with controlled phase separation of diblock copolymers, for the generation of nanoscale square patterns. These square arrays will enable simplified addressability and circuit interconnection in integrated circuit manufacturing and nanotechnology.