Assistant Professor Antonia Statt has joined a multi-institutional team awarded NSF DMREF funding to develop advanced photoresist materials for next-generation chip manufacturing. Using computational modeling, the team will design materials compatible with extreme ultraviolet lithography to enable smaller, more powerful semiconductors.
Written by Jackson Brunner
Assistant Professor Antonia Statt is part of a multi-institutional team awarded a four-year grant from the National Science Foundation's Designing Materials to Revolutionize and Engineer our Future (DMREF) program to revolutionize computer chip production.
Antonia Statt
The project, led by the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Whitney Loo, brings together researchers from Illinois, Wisconsin and the Air Force Research Lab to tackle a critical challenge in semiconductor manufacturing: developing photoresists compatible with extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography, the cutting-edge technology that enables manufacturers to pack more computing power onto smaller chips.
Statt's expertise will be essential to understanding how polymer-based photoresists behave at the nanoscale — knowledge that is crucial for designing materials that can pattern the incredibly tiny features required by modern chip manufacturing. By integrating computational modeling with chemistry, processing and characterization, the team aims to accelerate the development of new photoresist materials that can meet the demands of high-volume EUV lithography.
Joining Statt from Illinois are Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering professors Alexa S. Kuenstler (Illinois lead), Simon A. Rogers, and Damien S. Guironnet, along with Jeffrey Ethier from the Air Force Research Lab.
The project is one of 25 DMREF awards granted in 2025, supporting a total of 104 researchers across 44 universities. The DMREF program aims to bring new materials from laboratory discovery to commercial applications faster and more cost-effectively than traditional research approaches—a goal particularly critical for maintaining US leadership in semiconductor technology.