His startup's tools stamp lines and spaces into low-viscosity liquids
Grant Willson was teaching chemistry at the University of California at San Diego in the late 1970s when he struck up a friendly conversation with a janitor there. When Willson realized the janitor made more money than he did, he gave up his work on artificial sweeteners, took a job at IBM (at twice his professor's pay) and went to work on photoresists.
"At that time, the gating factor in lithography was resists," Willson recalled, "and working on resists was fun—a lot of fun." After developing resists for 313-nanometer-wavelength exposure tools and another resist for the thin-film heads used in IBM hard-disk drives, Willson went to work on a tough challenge: resists for the 248-nm deep-ultraviolet lithography generation.
With Hiroshi Ito and others, he developed chemically amplified resist technology that forms the basis of the resists used today. Willson said the resist formula was "carefully guarded, and IBM made its suppliers sign secrecy agreements" because the recipe let IBM shrink its chips and put more on every wafer than its competitors could.
Now at the University of Texas at Austin, Willson continues to innovate. With colleague S.V. Sreenivasen, a mechanical-engineering professor, Willson co-founded Molecular Imprints Inc., a thriving startup selling lithography tools that stamp a chip's lines and spaces into low-viscosity liquids. When exposed to light, the liquids harden into patterns—an approach that is much less costly than laser-based scanners.
"The fluid wants to fill those patterns in the template; it wants to work," Willson said. "Beyond that, I can't explain it."
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