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10GHz Processors and Ultraviolet Lithography
hoyosa writes "This article on zd-net reports that Extreme Ultraviolet LLC has built the first ultraviolet lithography stand for manufacturing processors. Will this make silicone obsolete? "
Some interesting bits in there. Also "Soon" means we won't see actual
chips until oh, say 2005, so don't hold your breath or anything.
UV lithography has nothing to do with silicon (or silicone, for that matter...)
It just means using light with a shorter wavelength to etch the silicon wafer, allowing you to use a smaller micron process than you could with longer wavelengths.
You'd still use silicon for the wafer. To say otherwise is like saying that deisel fuel makes cars obsolete. They're entirely different problems.
Kevin Fox
That article is over a year old
Actually I believe right now the fastest available CPU is the 1.2Ghz EV7. That is if you're talking about speed of computation. If your talking about clock speed (Which is still measuring the speed of something, though not necissaritly performance) the fastest chips run much faster then 1Ghz. It seems to me like the article is talking about clock speed.
Note the date of the article: January 11, 2001 2:41 PM PT
Maybe /. needs to post more of the article in the blurb, since it's becoming known that the intelligent masses can comment on stuff before reading wtf it's about.
People assume that Ultraviolet Lithography and Silicon are competitors, when in fact UV Lithography is the process that helps shrink featuresize.
Did you notice the date on this article?? Jan. 11th 2001!! Last year! hmmm.. old news?
While e-beam technology is, as stated, extremely flexible and useful as a 'one-off' prototyping method, it is also SLOW AS HECK. With millions of transistors, drawing one by one is not a solution for mass-production. With a wafer holding perhaps thousands of dies, I have heard from those in the industry that it can take up to 10 hours (hours!) for one wafer to be 'drawn'.
This Will Not Do.
-- "They say that time changes things. The truth is, you have to change them yourself." (Andy Warhol, adapted)
Well the 10GHz is the speed of the processor they think they are able to produce with EUV. It has nothing to do with the wavelength used in the etching process. The 10GHz just means that there is a clock thingy inside the processor which says 'tick' 10*10^9 times per second. Although this _does_ create a problem, as you hinted at. As the speed of light in vacuum is constant, it means that the clock signal will only propagate a certain length before the next 'tick'. With a 10GHz clock, the signal will propagate a maximum of about 3cm before the next 'tick' (high school physics, remember; c=lf, where c=speed of wave propagation, l=wavelength, f=frequency). Of course in reality it will propagate even less than 3cm (which is the wavelength you get if c=speed of light in vacuum=3*10^8m/s), as the speed of light inside the chip is somewhat slower than in vacuum. This will mean that the parts of the chip that are further away from the clock will be somewhat out of sync with the parts that are close to the clock. This is something chip designers certainly have to take into account. I'm not sure, maybe it is already an issue today?
Redundent and probably plagarism. This was in the article.. word for word.. mod down.
There are two big unsolved problems with "extreme ultraviolet" lithography, which is really X-ray lithography. First, you need a coherent X-ray source. The proposed options are a synchrotron, which is big (house-sized) and expensive, or an X-ray laser, which nobody has yet made work. Sandia has claimed a laser-pumped "plasma" source, but it doesn't yet have enough power to do the job.
Or, you can use a frequency-doubled UV laser (frequency-doubled Ar:F lasers are the current favourite, if memory serves).
Shining a laser beam through certain types of material produces an output beam that contains frequencies that are harmonics of the input beam's frequency, due to nonlinear interactions between the incident beam and the electrons in the material.
This has been used as a tool in the lab for years, and has been under intense investigation for lithography for quite a while now. My understanding is that frequency-doubled EUV sources are already shipping.