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New Horizon For Nanotech

Posted by Hemos on from the everyday-things-are-getting-smaller dept.

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."

4 of 28 comments (clear)

  1. Cool! by atrowe · · Score: 5
    The article doesn't mention cost, but I would assume that this technology would be signifigantly cheaper than the billions of dollars it currently takes to open a semiconducter fab. This decreased cost will make it possible for the technology to create cheap, powerful processors available to the masses.

    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.

    1. Re:Cool! by OxideBoy · · Score: 3
      E-beam lith is far, far more expensive than your stock CMOS fab. While you can do some nifty things, the fact remains it is a slow batch process that, in order to be scaled up to the same production level as the standard process, would probably require at least an order of magnitude larger capital investment.

      This will be a nice toy for chip designers and exotic devices, but any feasible mass-production 'nano'tech will almost certainly require a high degree of self-assembly, which e-beam lith is not.

  2. vacuous press release by dr.+loser · · Score: 3
    E-beam lithography is not new. This press release contained frustratingly little actual information. *All* e-beam machines (except projection systems like SCALPEL ) raster an electron beam. That's why e-beam lithography is historically slow - it's a serial process.

    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....

  3. MEMS based storage by sllort · · Score: 4

    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.