Semiconductors and integrated circuit fabrication technology in Mexico.

As of today, only 5 countries in the world are able to mass-produce and commercialize modern integrated circuits with nanoscaled dimensions: Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, China and USA, in that order. Mexico does not figure in this list even though has developed integrated circuits with more than 1,000 transistorssince 1984 and where each transistor had dimensions of only 10 m at that time. Now, the modern semiconductor industry is routinely mass-producing advanced transistors with designs of only 5 nm between source and drain. Some of the reasons behind this delay in developing nanoscaled semiconductor devices for Mexico are simple: Mexico did not have the economic, political nor enterprise capabilities that these 5 countries had and that enabled their fast-economic development in only a few decades. Also, there was only one institution in Mexico (INAOE) able to develop integrated circuits but whose infrastructure has reached its useful operational lifetime. Today, these conditions have changed since we have more national academic institutions doing excellent research on advanced electron materials and devices. Also, we at INAOE have initiated a national project aimed at renewing major equipment for developing advanced integrated circuits whose planar dimensions will be scaled down to 350 nm. In this talk, I will introduce some details behind the development of advanced integrated circuits, some of our old and new infrastructure to develop advanced electron devices at INAOE and some of the most representative results for logic, memory, sensing, photoactive and quantum technologies that are under continuous development even today. Since the pandemics brought difficult conditions for the global semiconductor industry (creating a shortage of integrated circuits in several industries), we believe that Mexico has the potential to fulfill some of these needs but this endeavor would not be possible without the national and international collaborations that we have and will further strength towards creating a national platform for the design, simulation, fabrication, characterization and application of integrated circuits for enhanced sensors in water, health, energy and other global emergent fields.