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Nanoimprint Lithography
An anonymous submitter writes "According to BBC News, researchers at Princeton have developed a die-stamp method for chip fabs. The Princeton site claims they've got to 10nm already. The professor in charge has told BBC News Online that they're '20 years ahead of Moore's Law.' Dubious claims aside, it looks like a handy way to bring down prices even if it doesn't improve ultimate top speed."
Moore's law really has nothing to do with speed even though people think it does.
/ mooreslaw.html
"More than 25 years ago, when Intel was developing the first microprocessor, company cofounder Gordon Moore predicted that the number of transistors on a microprocessor would double approximately every 18 months. To date, Moore's law has proven remarkably accurate. "
From : http://www.cnet.com/Resources/Info/Glossary/Terms
10 nm == .01 microns last time I looked.
1 nm = 1e-9 m
1 micron = 1e-6 m
I drink to prepare for a fight; tonight I'm very prepared. -Soda Popinksi
A company is already employing this technique commercially. See www.nanoopto.com. They're using it to fab photonic bandgap and other microoptical structures. I think this company came directly from the Princeton work (although the technique was invented at Harvard, I think.)
"just how dirty is the current process?"
Have you ever been to a chip fabrication lab? Those places are nasty; cyanide emergency kits on the walls, phosgene and arsine gases. Bad stuff.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
Contact holes are generally the toughest features to print. I'm sure they chose the contact arrays as demo images because of that fact. Lines are just as easily printable with this technique and in fact I've just seen a demo of a very similar technique that showed exactly this type of capability. ie. Brick patterned lines printed using a type of contact imprint lithography.
See this post... Moore's Law deals with transistor density. Anyway, increasing the die size doesn't work when we're talking about operating at hundreds of thousands of gigahertz, because the propegation delay from one end of the die to the other becomes longer than a single (or even multiple) cycles. -Berj
According to the Princeton site, this process only eliminates the photoresist developing process. Etching and photo resist stripping is still required and therefore you still have to use a lot of unfriendly chemicals. So only some of the chemicals are eliminated. Still some reduction is better than no reduction.
Every day, diffraction gratings are created with about 1nm accuracy using macroscopic tools. My father designed one which does just that. It is not impossible to imagine, therefore, that arbitrary features could similarily be scribed.
The machines which create the diffraction gratings are called ruling engines, and, not unlike the methods used to stamp metal currency, the masters are used to make duplicates which then are used to make the work tools. Each stage can be replicated N times, so while there is a limited lifetime of the entire process, N^3 can be quite large.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
But you can make several stamps from a single master (the process for making the stamps doesn't usually damage the master) and from each of those stamps make many replicas of the original surface relief. This is because you're usually stamping into a liquid medium (usually wet photoresist or reflown photoresist) and there isn't a huge amount of wear on the stamp. So, you really don't have to go back to the e-beam writer too often to make a new master. This is of course said with the caveat that this is a pretty new technique and there isn't a lot of data on long term lifetime of the stamps.