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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.
Egads, I hope not! It's my favorite synthetic rubber!
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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--
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?
"Will this make silicone obsolete?"
Silicone, used in breast implants, will NEVER become obsolete, as long there breathes horney men everywhere!
Silcon, on the other hand, may be superseded by some other material as a semiconductor.
Heh!
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.
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
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.
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.
The problem is actually worse than you indicate. Electrical signals on a chip propagate much slower than the speed of light due to the impedance properties of the signal traces.
This problem explains some of the "features" of the P4 that people complain about. The architecture reserves entire pipeline stages for "signal drive"; these stages are just to let signals propagate accross the chip. IIRC, the drive stages are wasted on today's P4's, but once the clock speed reaches higher GHz, they will be very necessary.
Concepts such as "hyperthreading" may become more popular as well. This allows multiple alternate CPU states sharing the same silicon. If they alternate every CPU clock, for example, one hyperthread can be calculating while the other one is propagating its last clock's results across the chip.
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.
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.
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.