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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.
If the chip industry gets out of silicon, then the demand will decrease and prices will increase for some of silicons other "uses" we could all be effected
Egads, I hope not! It's my favorite synthetic rubber!
Anonymous Luddite: "What do you think of the dehumanizing effects of the Internet?"
Andy Grove: "Not Much."
No, this does not have anything to do with breast implants, but it WILL make silicon obsolete.
Remember, there were no nuclear weapons before women were allowed to vote.
Moore's Law, formulated by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore, states that the number of transistors a chip can hold will double every 18 to 24 months, as transistor size shrinks. More transistors, which switch off and on to represent binary data, lead to a corresponding leap in performance.
The lithography technique now used, called deep ultraviolet, will suffice for one or two more generations of manufacturing processes, down to chip features the size of 100 nanometers, or one-tenth of a micron. Chipmakers are working on switching to 0.13-micron processes.
As chipmakers reduce sizes below 100 nanometers, a new lithography technology will be needed--because as chip features decrease in size, the wavelength of light used in the lithography process must also be decreased. Deep ultraviolet lithography uses a wavelength of 240 nanometers. EUV uses a much shorter wavelength.
Without a next-generation lithography technology like EUV, chip manufacturers, including AMD and Intel, would hit a wall in 2004 or 2005, when they would be unable to produce faster chips.
Would not UV lithography work on silicon?
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
"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.
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
--Mike--
That article is over a year old
From the article: The fastest PC processors today top out just above 1GHz.
I think I speak for us all when I say:
What?
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?
At least there will always be a secondary use for silicone.
forma3
This article in the the story is nearly a year old...
/. will be reporting the details the florida recount ?
Tomorrow
Contain my voice. Place my user into your foe list.
Comparing Megahertz on processors is like comparing Civics to Corvettes. "My Corvette can do 6000 RPM!" "Oh yeah, my Honda can do 8000 RPM!"
Its just no longer a useful way of measuring.
Just as a 1.x Ghz P-III and a 1.x Ghz P-IV are not the same.
I wonder if CmdrTaco is dating his checks 2001. Thought that article looked familiar, read it a year ago.
now - 2ghz
June 2003 - 4ghz
January 2005 - 8ghz
Spring 2005 - 10ghz
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
i'm wondering what will happen with 10 Ghz processor because every cycle, lights can only travel about 3 cm...?
Extreme Ultraviolet LLC has built the first ultraviolet lithography stand for manufacturing processors.
Um, we've been using UV for a while now. This company has built the first _Extreme_ UV rig. This is especially obvious as a press release when you realize that they can define EUV as beginning more or less wherever they feel like. The term "EUV" was coined when "X-Rays" got a bad name in lithography circles (it used to be "deep UV", "Soft X-Rays", "Hard X-Rays").
Will this make silicone obsolete?
a) "Silicon".
b) No.
The article says:
"EUV technology is very extendable...and we have demonstrated that it would work down to the 30-nanometer level," Gwyn said.
Barring a new invention, which is always possible, "It should take us to the end of silicon...as we know it today," he said.
In english: The limits of silicon technology will run out before the limits of EUV technology.
They're not ending silicon - they're saying that as long as silicon will be around, photolithography will be around.
This is too damn easy.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
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
Heh, something called "freudian slip" comes to mind..
;-)
The age old question of "Whats on a man's mind" can now be awnsered: Silicone and not silicon
Why don't they concentrate on solid state hard drives, or better yet, a fibre optic bus... and bring the price down for them first, that processor at 10 GHz will spend more time waiting for the hard drive than anything.
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.
I think what the submitter meant is that devices created with this new technology will so captivate nerds that it will completely displace any desire for women, thus making silicone obsolete.
"People that quote themselves in their signatures bother me" - athakur999
The guy writing the ZD-net article seems to be making the assumption that the only (or primary at least) factor affecting the performance (or even the physical speed) of a CPU is the manufacturing process. Doesn't he seem to be forgeting the architecture issue? I mean, intel is currently ahead in the physical speed dept, not because of the manufacturing process, but because of architecture.
Woopty Doo Basil, what does it all mean?!
Quote: "Barring a new invention, which is always possible, "It should take us to the end of silicon...as we know it today," he [Chuck Gwyn, program director for EUV at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, Calif.] said."
... and I assume it will take a couple of dozen, at least, to make sure the yield doesn't drop through the floor.
The limit for Silicon is hit when the paths "lithogrified" onto the wafers are less than a certain width, by this time measured in number of atoms. The distance between silicon atoms in a wafer is (again AFAIK) 0.235 nm, so today's 0.13-micron processes (130 nm) mean average path widths of ~550 atoms
So - this is not about anything other than silicon, just the limits of this particular semiconductor.
What else is there? Gallium Arsenide, AFAIK. But that's another story.
yes, we have no bananas
I'm a power user. I make computer music and videos. 10GHz would be cool...
But still, I yawned when I read this feature.
Fact is, we don't need more GHz.
What we need is more bandwidth (way more bandwidth) and some really innovative interesting software. (I.e. not that cack the Redmond guys have been producing for the last decade.)
We need smart apps, better interfaces and reliability. (The effective GHz count gets cut to shreds every time there's a crash or data loss.)
We need imagination, creative flair and colour...
We don't need Windows, which still thinks it's living in the 80s. And we don't need Linux, which is the kind of long-haired, sandal-wearing geek-fest that gave the 70s a bad name.
(Open Source? Yeah, so what if only terminal nerds care enough to use it? Like I want to know horizontal and vertical scan rates before I can get Xfree to run. Right...)
Bottom line - who cares about 10GHz when most software has been designed by social inadequates who get excited by things that most people think are just plain sad?
We need software that makes life easier, not harder and more aggravating.
When we have that, 10GHz may start to matter again.
Great... so can we expect Intel to keep extending the pipeline in the processor so they can up the clock rate? Or are they going to actually going to improve the processor for something other than Quake?
Nowadays all I associate clockrate with is Intel's marketing machine. AMD has slowly increased the clock rate and kept the price/performance gap decent AFAIK.
At any rate, sounds like good engineering innovation.
"We expect to have the first full field-scanned images by April 1,"
Q. Why haven't marketing people realized that using April 1 as a target date, for anything, just isn't a good idea?
Really, did we learn nothing during the 20th century? How about March 31 instead?
"Would it kill you to put down the toilet seat?" -- Maya Angelou
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)
For the record, it's silicon, not silicone. Silicon is a semiconductor; Silicone used to caulk window frames and for certain 'implants'.
The question is begged... how would a new lithography process which will enable silicon to continue to be used for another decade, make silicon obsolete? I really don't see how the original poster could have misunderstood this so grossly.
And remember, you have to make a pass through the E-beam machine for each layer.
What? The frequency of the light is independent of the size of the die. The light is shining *down* on the die. I fail to see any relevance in your post...
:wq
Hmm... what we need then is an e-beam with some sort of prism-like splitter in front of it... sort of like when you you glue ten pens together to write 10 lines of text at once. If you could split a single e-beam into 1,000 parallel e-beams, separated by the right distances, you could then write 1,000 chips in parallel while still avoiding the need to draw up a mask.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Silicon will become obsolete when the size of the gates inside the chip equals the wavelength of a
electron. At this point the transistors cease to trasmit.
There are already several replacements for silicon - copper compounds,
magnetic alloys, fullerenes etc. - in order to keep up with Moore's law.
But for many engineers throwing out silicon is difficult to imagine.
For a number of years now almost all R&D in the semiconductor industry
has been focussed on silicon-based chips. Throwing out silicon would
mean letting of f a huge base of information acquired over 1/2 a century.
Chipmakers on fast track to 10GHz
... ...
By John G. Spooner
ZDNet News
January 11, 2001 2:41 PM PT
The semiconductor industry has reached an important milestone on the path to producing 10GHz chips
Trolls: 1
slashdot: 0
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.
Out of curiousity, I compared mpeg play back on both windows2K and BeOS on a dual P3 450 system with 32mb video and 512mb of ram. BeOS was able to play back full screen without skipping. Win2K skipped probably a few frames every minute and was very noticeable. Now I wasn't being very scientific about the test obviously, I just wanted to see if the hardware was capable of full screen (1280 X 1024 res) play back. The answer from a viewing perspective is yes.
Although the older P3 architecture running on 100mhz bus with a single CPU isn't good enough for professional quality video editing (non-linear editing), the newer systems would perform much better. In comparison, a lot of professionals use Mac and Final Cut Pro 3. Having a 10ghz CPU will do very little for non-linear video editing.
The hardware needs better bus architecture and the OS needs to be designed for streaming large amounts of data rapidly, which windows NT kernel currently does not do well. Microsoft has tried to get their systems into film school for editing with poor results. Linux isn't any better in that respect, so the only viable solution (BeOS) for PC video editing is gone.
As more consumers get comfortable with video and music editing, the OS will have to change to meet the demand. If microsoft and intel doesn't, some one else will. This whole mhz battle won't go on forever. At some point, it will cease being the primary factor for consumer PC's.
I don't know that I'd want to use e-beam for prototyping. Your electrical performance might be so different that you could get fooled into thinking you have something which works. Prototyping isn't only for functional verification, it's also needed to see if you're meeting setup/hold times, jitter specs, etc, and that stuff is process sensitive.
A better use for e-beaming is fixing/moding of prototype parts when a bug is found. Mask sets are so expensive now a days, if you suspect you've found the cause of a problem (and its small), you're better off trying to fix a few parts first.
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'.
I think you mean 1 step in the wafer building process. In 0.13um you currenly get anywhere from 1-3 steps per day, and there are roughly 200 steps to making a wafer. That works out to about 3 month to make one batch of wafers.
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?
the adult film industry will make sure it that it does become obsolete it's only because it's been replaced with something better
Silicon: Chemical Formula Si, Atomic Number 14 in period table of elements, 2nd most common element in Earth's crust behind oxygen. Semiconductor. If silicon were to become obsolete we would need a replacement for stuff like rocks and materials as well as glass and concrete.
Silica: SiO2, as pure a white crystaline material abundant in nature. Fused quartz is pure amorphus silica.
Silicate: chemical compound containing silicon, oxygen, and one or more metals, e.g., aluminum, barium, beryllium, calcium, iron, magnesium, manganese, potassium, sodium, or zirconium. Found in quartz minerals such as agate, amethyst, chalcedony, flint, jasper, onyx, and rock crystal, opal, sand, sandstone, clay, granite, and many other rocks; in skeletal parts of various protists and animals, such as certain sarcodines, diatoms, and sponges, and in the stems and other tissue of higher plants.
Silicone: inorganic polymer in which atoms of silicon and oxygen alternate in a chain; various organic radicals, such as the methyl group, CH3, are bound to the silicon atoms. As linear polymers silicones form a large class of useful fluids and greases. When crosslinked they form a useful class of synthetic rubbers.
This article appears to be over a year old! January 11th, 2001 is its date...
Now that Silicon's gonna be obsolete, I think she'll have to go with UV breasts... I can see it now.
This is a process for lithography into silicon, which is what we already use, except it's slightly more precise.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
And ironically you misquoted as well, Moore said that transistor density would double every 18 months, not chip speed (which is closely related).
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
love your work. when you getting moderation up for user submissions?
Remember, there were no nuclear weapons before women were allowed to vote.
One on the questions on my physics test last year was about UV litography (since a swedish company is developing parts for it). Any way it increases the amount of circuits on the same area with a factor of about 400.
"Also "Soon" means we won't see actual chips until oh, say 2005, so don't hold your breath or anything."
Do you think that's air you're breathing?
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
You are right about the mechanical hard drives being slow - but how is a fibre optic bus going to help this?
;-)
Sure, you could increase the clock frequency on the bus, but the need for (very) high frequency electronics would still be there. The most serious bottleneck would probably be between the processor and the RAM.
But - as a student in the fibre field I hope we will see such busses soon
Yeah, and I've got a 100:1 lossless compression scheme to sell you.
Ultraviolet lithography was around for a while already. Stands to make paths even on crystals are already exist. Someone just pulled out one of military projects.
> "We expect to have the first full field-scanned
> images by April 1," said Chuck Gwyn, program director
I wonder if there's any significance to the date...
RMN
~~~
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.
In the mean time, the folks at places like CAMD have had coherent xrays for a while. There are supposed to be about five other labs like this around. I supose you could try to miniturize this technology. If someone comes up with something better, great, but the techniques that can take advantage of it ARE being worked out today.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I think by "much shorter" they're probably referring to 193nm ArF eximer laser photolithography or, more likely, 157nm F2 photolithography. The International Semiconductor Technology Roadmap pegs 157nm lithography as the likely candidate for the 70nm feature node.
Actually, the biggest problem facing 157nm litho right now is optics. Fused silica works well for 100+nm wavelengths, but its transmission drops off significantly below that, so that by the time we reach 157nm, silica is practically opaque, useless as a lens material.
Most of the industry has been looking at Calcium Fluoride (CaF2) as the next optical material for photolithography; unfortunately, researchers at NIST revealed last May that CaF2 has a high level of intrinsic birefringence. This means that a CaF2 lens would only refract light correctly if it is polarized along the <111> or <001> directions. So a stepper system would require a substantial increase in the number of lenses to keep correcting the light path.
This runs into the other problem with CaF2: current processes for manufacture of optical-grade CaF2 crystals result in low yields, and the growth system may create additional, stress-induced birefringence effects. Without a sufficient supply of high-purity CaF2, the industry may have to shelve this whole technology in favor of one of the NGL techniques, like the electron beam technology described in the article. On the other hand, none of the NGL technologies are as yet mature enough to make them feasible.
Of course, Moore's Law keeps pushing the semiconductor industry ahead. One way or another, they'll figure out a solution.
As a disclaimer: I am not a semiconductor scientist/PhD/expert/pundit/etc. -- just someone who likes to follow the field. The above may or may not be accurate, and you are welcome to say so.
"Anything is better than IE, and you can quote me on that." -- Wil Wheaton.
Instead of making a mask, you produce a pattern of raised points on a conducting plate. These points will emit electrons when a field is applied. You can then use reducing electron optics to produduce a much smaller image of your source on your semiconductor target. The whole chip could be imaged at once, so this would be no slower than conventional sources.
You could use a similar trick with ions. These have a bigger mass/charge ratio, so they take more volts to accelerate, but they are less put off by stray electrical and magnetic fields. The better ion beam milling microscopes use sub-nm beams these days.
I personally prefer the Saline breasts myself much more natural feeling!! and you know that counts
moo.
Notice that in an article following the one anouncing the end of silicone that a 2.2ghz chip is being introduced. This is 2002, 18 months from now we shopuld have a 4.2-5ghz chip and 18 months from then a 8.4-10ghz chip. Moores law predicts a 10ghz chip by 2005 so why is anyone surprised?
Thats like getting as P4-4ghz FOR FREE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
No. It has long been recognized that one of the goals of computation is to make machine time less expensive than programmer time. Optimized, non portable code isn't worth the extra time it takes to create. My time is best spent writing solving high level problems, not low level ones. Let megahertz clean up the gory details.
Yes, I do this for a living.
No, I am not stupid.
Writers imply. Readers infer.