The chemistry of microelectronic polymers.

The minimum feature size of today's state of the art devices is less than 1micron. This reduction in feature size has largely been accomplished using conventional UV exposure tools and photoresist materials. Further advances will most likely require the development of new resist materials, the use of novel processing techniques and alternate lithographic technologies such as deep UV, electron beam, x-ray or ion beam lithography. Many of the new chemistries and approaches that are being developed are described in this article. It is becoming increasingly obvious that the continued growth in chip dimensions and demand for on-chip functional density is causing a revolution in microelectronics packaging technology.