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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.
"The fastest PC processors today top out just above 1GHz." um... I assume they don't realize that the fastest are BELOW 1 ghz (risc, itanium, etc.)
Remember, there were no nuclear weapons before women were allowed to vote.
I noticed that in the article, the author mentions Moore's Law as stating that transistor densities double every 18-24 months. Wasn't it originally 12 months, then changed to every 12-18 months?
i'm wondering what will happen with 10 Ghz processor because every cycle, lights can only travel about 3 cm...?
While EUV technology is very likely to dominate the mass markets like x86s CPU, northbridges, etc. E-beam technology could bring much more competition to the market. As the article and serveral other source told us, e-beam tech. "draws" the transitors one by one to the silicone. This drawing process is much slower than the normal mask-based lithography. But you do not need a mask, you can make changes to the chip layout much faster because you don't need to make new masks and must just change the programming of your e-beam chip printer.
This could enable cost-effective low-volume chip series made with a cutting edge manufacturing process. It could also make expensive and "slow" fpga based chip emulators obsolete. It could also be the break-through for open hardware because open chip design could be manufatured without big finacial problems.
Jan
The 10GHz frequency they are planning now has a wave length of 3cm (1.2"); meanwhile the CPUs are growing in size (since the number of transistors grows faster than the path shrinks) and will soon outgrow the ¼ of the wavelength; then makers will have soon to either stop the freq increase, or slice the CPU (either internally or externally) in smaller parts.
Just to avoid any confusion, I recall that the 240nm wavelength cited for Deep UV is a frequency of 1,250,000GHz, that is 125,000 times the 10GHz of the future CPUs. Of course the EUV are still higher than DUV in freq.
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.
The other problem is that the masks have to be almost perfect down to the atomic level. Surprisingly, there are ways to do this. It looks like that problem will be solved.
However, the whole technology is nowhere near working. The major web pages on the subject haven't been updated for a year or so, which is a bad sign. Much of the work is being done at the old A-bomb labs (LLNL and Sandia), which today are sort of senior activity centers for old physicists. All the articles seem to come from there. We're not seeing much in the way of EUV articles from semiconductor-fab equipment manufacturers yet.
There's considerable speculation in the industry that there might be a hiatus of a few years around 2004-2006, during which there won't be much progress in line width. This happened once before in the semiconductor industry, in the 1970s. But it's not the end; EUV should eventually work.
Sometime around 2014 or so, we reach the End of Silicon, or at least the end of improvements to lithography on flat silicon, because atoms are too big. Further progress will require a new technology.