Effect of film thickness and domain spacing on defect densities in directed self-assembly of cylindrical morphology block copolymers.

Directed assembly of block copolymer thin films is recognized as a high-throughput, low-cost complement to optical lithography with the ability to overcome the 32 nm natural resolution limit of conventional lithographic techniques. For bulk block copolymer systems, desired feature sizes ranging from 5 to 100 nm can be obtained by controlling the molecular weight and composition of a block copolymer, as long as the bulk order-disorder temperature (ODT) is such that the copolymer is well-segregated at the processing conditions. However, our studies on graphoepitaxially aligned cylindrical morphology block copolymer monolayer and bilayer films demonstrate that, as domain sizes are reduced, the block copolymer becomes increasingly susceptible to an unacceptably high density of thermally generated defects, resulting in a significant reduction of the ODT. Thus, in thin films, the minimum feature spacing accessible is limited by thermal defect generation and not by the bulk ODT. Our experimental studies on monolayer films of cylindrical morphology polystyrene-b-poly(2-vinyl pyridine) with microdomain spacings approaching 20 nm reveal that defect densities and the ODT are surprisingly sensitive to variations as small as 2 nm in the microdomain spacing. Additionally, the monolayer and bilayer ODT differ by nearly 100 °C when the monolayer domain spacing is 20 nm, while the difference is only 20 °C when the monolayer domain spacing is 22 nm. We explain this behavior using a quantitative estimation of the energetic cost of defect production in terms of the domain spacing, χN, and block copolymer composition. These studies reveal unexpected consequences on the equilibrium defect densities of thin film block copolymers which must be accounted for when designing a block-copolymer-based directed-assembly process.