Area-selective atomic layer deposition for bottom-up fabrication of nanoelectronics

Ever since Richard Feynman’s lecture on nanotechnology entitled There is plenty of room at the bottom, one of the main challenges in nanoscience has been to develop reliable approaches for bottom-up processing of materials. Despite this vision, the miniaturization of electronics in the past few decades according to Moore’s law relied completely on innovations in top-down processing. In this article, the alternative of using area-selective ALD for bottom-up fabrication is discussed. The approaches that currently exist for achieving area-selective ALD are reviewed, together with their merits and limitations.