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New Horizon For Nanotech
UserID 3.14 writes "It looks like faster chip-building tehnology is coming, and it may usher in the next wave of MEMS and nanotechnology with it. This article from Science Daily talks about a new electron-beam photolithography machine at JPL that rasterizes 10 times faster than the previous standard with a beam imprint that's half the size. Chip prototyping will go faster and the researchers there will be able to deal with features that are molecule-sized. Best of all, if you want to use the machine, they give a contact for further info."
Oh, but we already have. Ranging from 8-bitters to the LEON (32 bit SPARC implementation, written under ESA contract).
Of course, there is a lot more to open source hardware than just CPUs, just look at OpenCores.
JPL... is that their sticker symbol? :).
They just replaced a really old system, and decided they could get some PR value from that. [shrug]
This allows basically 2-d nanostructures. But we're still building it in the "macro" fashion: doing templates, using bulk chemical processes for "developing", etc. I can see this leading to a nanoscale manipulating arm, but this is just a step on the road. We'll be at genuine nanotech when we can do molecular nanoconstruction on the single-atom/molecule/fragment scale, in three dimensions. When will THAT be ?? No clue, but I'm hoping for under 10 years. . .
*Of course, if you can scale all the circuits by 2x then you don't need as much area, but device and transmission line scaling doesn't work that way...
no sig here
No, tunneling is still a problem, especially in the gate oxides on MOS devices. However, they don't tell us their beam size for this system, only that it is half of the system it replaces (that was 12 years old I believe?). This leads me to think this system has a resolution on the order of 10 nm. Gate oxides under 3 nm are the ones that begin seeing larger tunneling currents (to become a concern).
Those guys over in the Data Storage Systems Center ain't got nothin' on the one true CMU MEMS Lab. Oh, sure, they've got genuine applications that people actually need and that can show a profit and stuff, but we've got weird far-reaching projects like microstructured scaffolds for growing engineered tissues! (Don't bother looking; it's not linked from the page 'cause the website never gets updated.)Why, we've got genuine doctors (with MDs and everything!) working with us to build new biosensors! *And* we've got a display case!
Anyway, I'm sure we'll be turning out profitable projects any day now. No, really. Just wait.
I thought once you got down below a certain scale electrons had this nasty habit of magically jumping between semiconductor plates. How did they solve that problem? Or is the scale they're working at still too big? Just curious -- I haven't heard anyone griping about the problem lately and didn't hear that it'd been solved.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Depends on how you're counting. For several years now, nanotech researchers have been building real, workable nanomachines that actually _do stuff_ (e.g., motors, lasers, etc.) However, to date, none of them have been reliable enough or cheap enough to be used for any large-scale applications. This may be the first step in moving nanotech out of the lab and into industry. So in that sense it's the "first wave" from the engineer's perspective, but the "next wave" from the scientist's.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
and it may usher in the next wave of MEMS and nanotechnology with it
The 'Next Wave' of nanotech? I don't think there was a first wave, unless you consider the masterbatory fantasies of extropians and sci-fi worshippers.
Oh wait, they're the same thing...
--
Feminism is the wild notion that women are human beings.
Boy, I can't wait 'till we have open hardware! That would be so cool. Maybe after that, we can move even further on, and have "Open Source" engineering. Wouldn't it be great to know that the bridge you're driving across of the skyscraper you work in weren't designed by professionals, but by the community during their spare time? Boy, that idea just excites me so much!
--
Feminism is the wild notion that women are human beings.
I'm just hoping that they've perfected this stuff by the time I'm around 50 and heart disease starts being a problem for me.
Hopefully, they'll have a nanobot that can go about my arteries, sweeping cholestrol away!
This would also make it possible for the open-source movement to expand into hardware as well as software. Imagine renting time at the local fab to sample a processor that was designed entirely by the community. If this technology pans out, we could eventually adapt all the advantages of today's open-source software into low cost open-source hardware. I can't wait to see what advances in microprocessor technology will evolve once the open-source community sets it's mind to developing a free(as in speech) processor. Yay!
-atrowe: Card-carrying Mensa member. I have no toleranse for stupidity.
You could be seeing the results of that.
I've done extensive nanofabrication, and these guys have chosen their words so carefully as to be misleading. When they talk about making structures on the "subcellular" scale for biological research, it sounds impressive but really isn't. A typical red blood cell is 5 microns across. The smallest features produced photolithographically for your Athlon are 0.13 microns across. Even more annoying is their claim of molecular and submolecular scale device size without actually naming a number. Molecules can be big - DNA can be many microns long when uncoiled.
A meaningful figure of merit for resolution is: how small a feature can you pattern in resist and then transfer to an underlying substrate, either by etching or through metallization. Fundamentally, e-beam lithography's resolution is limited by the choice of resist, the physics of the development process, and the subsequent pattern transfer step. Making features smaller in width than 10 nm (roughly 40 atoms) is exceedingly hard, even in isolation. Doing that regularly, at production speeds with sub-10 nm registration across a 30 cm wafer, is industrially unachievable right now.
As far as I can tell, this is not a breakthrough in any way, shape, or form. This kind of overhype worries me. It's almost worse than the utopian claptrap from people like Drexler - everyone with a clue know Drexler is a loon, but people may actually believe spokespeople from JPL....
Now they can design and make chips even faster. Now they can make even more powerful chips.
If they, 'they' being major chip manufacturers are to make chips go through even faster, that high end gaming rig you bought last month just might be able to keep up with the chip released this month.
Don't get me wrong, I like the fact that hardware can be developed faster. It's just that as things are, my 'gaming rig' is a duron850 with a 16 meg video card. Nothing high end, but it runs sweet and stable. Despite being a windows box.
Anyways, I just want to know, how fast exactly will the chips be going? And will it shatter Moore's law into oblivion?
01101001 01100001 01101101 01101110 01101111 01110100 01100001 01101100 01100001 01110111 01111001 01100101 01110010
Even though this new system is 10 times faster than their previous rig, e-beam litho is a very slow method of pattern writing. The smaller spot size should be great for research into two dimensional structures. While this is cool, there must be university research that's pushing the envelope even more than this. This doesn't seem like front page material to me. Anyone have any links to an even faster rastered or smaller spot sized rig (although the article didn't give any numbers IIRC)?
Bowie, I don't know why you're saying (and so rudely!) that VA Linux have not done the right thing by the investor community. I personally bought some shares of @LNUX a few weeks ago for $1.56 each, and have since almost doubled my money! I think they are an excellent company with very strong growth potential.
I just think it's sad to see people writing unpleasant messages on web boards to try to influence stock prices downwards and harm other people's valuable investments.
"An ye harm none, do what ye will" - The Wiccan Rede
Reason, free market capitalism, and individualism
While we're dropping cool terms in the story header, let's pretend for a moment that no one knows what MEMS based storage is, and give them the link to the MEMS Research Unit at CMU, where they are prototyping and developing this stuff right now.
The short story is that it's a very small sled containing magnetic data (on a substrate) that is pushed by very small actuators of an assembly over read/write heads. It fits on the price/speed/storage curve somewhere in between hard drives and Flash. If you want to know more from people who actually know what they're talking about, read the intro and then click on their research papers.
I sure wish you could buy the stuff, but it's still a few years from primetime.