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In microelectronic device manufacturing, photosensitive organic insulators (POIs) are widely used during passivation steps to protect and preserve the chips from damage due to subsequent processes and from the external environment. To ensure high performance and to maintain chip quality, a well-controlled POI lithography process and corresponding defectivity monitoring are needed. In this work, we present an automated method developed by STMicroelectronics and KLA for POI defectivity and process control employing a KLA 8 Series inspection system with illumination in the visible range. The highly sensitive macro inspection tool with dedicated analysis approaches and solutions successfully enabled the detection of the principal defects of interest, the identification of defectivity root causes through automatic classification and review, and the evaluation of the layer thickness and uniformity through reflected intensity heatmaps. For several months, this protocol has been applied to the production environment, proving to be effective in detecting even small deviations from the standard process. Here, we present some promising results obtained with this strategy, highlighting the benefits in terms of rework reduction and improved equipment management.

Organic π−conjugated compounds have experienced over the last decades a tremendous interest as versatile and highly performing active components in a large variety of devices and applications. Two peculiar characteristics of organic materials are key for their technological exploitation. Firstly, most organic conjugated materials can be manufactured by low cost, solution based deposition techniques. Moreover, the intrinsic flexibility of both their electrochemical and optical properties holds promises for custom designed active materials. On this respect, the formulation of general structure-property relationships is a key requirement. This talk will address the main characteristics connected with reversible redox behaviour in conjugated materials: charge transport capabilities and tuning of optical properties. The discussion will focus on the structural design required for the preparation of preferentially n or p dopable semiconducting polythiophenes derivates highlighting the role of heteroaromatic compounds as intrinsically electron excessive or electron deficient building blocks. The role of solid state interactions in both single and multi component thin layers will then describe, focusing on recent examples of organic-based electrochromic devices developed in the frame of the EELICON FP7 project.

The wide use of lithium in rechargeable batteries has made it strategic and expensive and therefore different approaches have been recently investigated to overcome this issue. Even though sodium has higher atomic weight, higher oxidation potential and bigger ionic radius than lithium, it can be a valuable alternative in less weight/volume-sensitive applications because of its wider availability and lower costs. At the present, the most promising sodium systems use a transition metal oxide and hard carbon as positive and negative electrode, respectively. In this configuration, considering the material specific capacity and the discharge profiles, the battery could be reasonably able to display an energy density of about 70-80% of lithium analogous with unexplored power density. However, several polycrystalline compounds show lower diffusivity barrier for Na+ compared to Li+ homologous structures. Among the oxide materials, different phases have been proposed like NaCrO2, NaxCoO2, NaxMnO2, and NaxMn0.5Fe0.5O2showing capacity about 100-150 mAh/g in the potential range from 2.0 to 4.0 V vs. metallic sodium with good kinetic. In particular, the Na0.67[Fe0.5Mn0.5]O2P2 structure has received significant attention due to the presence of the relative inexpensive and environmental friendly Mn and Fe in the structure. We report here two different low cost methods to prepare Na0.67[Mn0.5Fe0.5]O2 (NMFO); the former route is based on sol gel approach from acetate precursors in methanol while the latter one on the use of cotton as template agent. The suitable chemical precursors as well as the thermal treatment procedures were carefully selected after TGA/DSC analysis of various reaction mixtures. The resulting phases have been structural characterized by XRPD with Rietveld analysis which reveals that a small amount of hematite (< 5%) is present in both samples. The morphological analysis by SEM and TEM confirm the good crystallinity and show the characteristic platelet shape having several mm largeness and few hundred nm thickness. The electrochemical characterization was performed in 3 electrode Swagelock type cell using metallic sodium as both counter and reference electrode and a 1M solution of NaClO4in EC:DMC 1:1 + FEC 2% as electrolyte. The charge discharge profiles show the two characteristic plateau at low (2.3/2.7 V) and high potential (3.6/4.0 V) vs. metallic sodium. The galvanostatic cycling results (see Figure 1, sol gel material) reveals a reversible specific capacity of about 120, 110, and 60 mAh/g at current rates of C/20, C/10, and C/2, respectively. In conclusion, both low cost methods are able to produce micrometric sized NMFO materials with good electrochemical properties as cathodes in sodium ion battery.