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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
it is 0.01 micron
but what's ONE ORDER OF MAGNITUDE between friends?
How do they make the ultra small quartz die to burn the patterns? Grow it perhaps?
I've experimented with this technique a bit, and surprisingly it is very capable of replicating super tiny features. Surprising because the stamps are most commonly made from a flexible polymer material. They are very good at replicating tiny features from a master fabricated using electron beam lithography. One thing that we weren't able to solve was doing alignments between layers, since the stamps tend to be thick and hard to see through. But this is just an engineering issue that we didn't have the time or inclination to solve.
I was just blown away that we were able to fabricate high fidelity microstructures using what basically amount to a rubber stamp!
The two links gush with claims but provide little evidence of its utility. The only demonstration shown there demonstrates making holes in substrate, or leaving dots of material. It does not show making any traces. I'd wait to be impressed until I see something beyond a row of dots.
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This sounds great, but how do they make the mold, what kind of wear and tear is the mold subject to? My guess is that one of these 'nano-imprint' molds is not going to last all that long.
I am assuming they are relying on something like electron beam lithography to create the imprint mold, certainly this would be a cost/time improvement over direct e-beam litho, but it all depends on longevity of the molds.
-josh
I saw this several years ago, "Block Print Lithography", an article in Science. They were able to do, at the time, 80nm resolution features in metal.
It has serious problem however in producing the blocks to use in the printing, and aligning them properly in use.
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Maybe this means AMD will cut their prices on Athlon chips even more! With ram being so cheap, and this making it able to create more chips at less cost, maybe I really can have that beowulf cluster I've always wanted! Now what to do with it....
In college, really poor, need a flatscreen.
Take note of that third section: no nasty chemicals, they claim. If their claim holds, a company using this tech could make a lot of political capital from it.
Natural questions arise: just how dirty is the current process? Will the details of the method really prove to be as clean as they say?
Lately democracy seems to be based on the skybox, the Happy Meal box, the X-box, and the idiot box.
Moore's Law is just based on a different commercial corrollary(sp?) That is, hardware manufacturers will improve electronics features/performance at the rate that will maxmize profit for them. We all know Intel had 2Ghz chips 6 years ago, but they just increase the speed incrementally until we all upgrade. Then they release the next round of chips. In all seriousness. I knew a lady who worked for DEC and she said they purpsosefully put NOPs in the microcode in their Vax, so they could sell a "Faster" version later. They just removed the NOPs.
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.)
I think this is a company I heard about because they can't make good transistors. The transistors are very small but they veary in quality wildly. Some are 20 times slower than others. Synchronous designs suffer badly because of it. It becomes reather difficuit to work out your critical path.
They were intrested in DI (delay insensitive) methods because even if you have a very slow transistor the design will still work and if you dont go through the tranny then it will work at full speed.
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$1 billion is a lot, but the companies are getting used to it. Keep in mind that many of the new facilities Intel and AMD have built (or are in the process of planning/building) will cost $3 billion or more, and only a small fraction of that is structural.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
Altogether, it looks like a nice process, but it's not immediately clear that it will help.
This kinda news is like people using oil instead of hydrogen or other fuels to power cars.
This isnt good, because sure we can keep using this process, but we should use something new and better.
How is keeping intel and others from innovating by improving exsisting technology better than forcing them to innovate and create new technology?
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Don't you just have to get the oil really hot?
Since the scale is actually .01 micron, I don't think that any process based on the current tech used to make processors will catch up any time soon.
t'nera semordnilap
Read his post, he was only kidding. No one actually thinks that Intel/AMD have super fast ships" in hiding somewhere. Well, no one who known the industry well.
Moderation: Put your hand inside the puppet head!
Why don't we just increase the die size?
(I know, more defects, etc. but it is another direction we can take)
These guys should quiet down. If they get together the other scientists in this field, they could take the next 20 years off. Now, if only I could find a way to do the same thing...
--Josh
There are exactly 42,935,718 letter sized sheets in a square mile.
Lasers spread too much... unless you go to REALLY short wave-length light.
... unless that's what you want? I was reading an article the other day that seemed to imply that you could knock some holes in a crystal, slather a material on the surface, and then treat the crystal so that it absorbed the dopants where it had been dislocated. Perhaps you could get an even better effect if you plated the stuff on and then hit it with a high energy photon where you wanted it to penetrate??
Now there was talk recently about an electron-beam laser that might give this some competition. And when that gets a bit too spread out, you could substitute a meson for the electron...
I think that it they can make this work, it could be a lot better than electron beams, and certainly than lasers. Those really short wave length photons tend to penetrate too deeply, and knock around the crystal structure
(I've never heard of this process before, so I hereby claim invention!! It's MINE! I may even patent it. [Of course, I haven't yet....])
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
woah, that sounds easy !
but can someone explain to me how this will make a difference ?
If it helps...
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"2^20 times denser! For those of you who aren't so fast, that's just over a million."
You're not so fast yourself, bub. Try and get your math right before you get all condescending.
Moore's Law doubles in density every 18 months, not every year. So the correct calculation is 2^(20*12/18), which is roughly 10,321, or 3 orders of magnitude lower than what you stated.
"Mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent present in every electron." -Freeman Dyson
I've just heard a talk on a very similar technique that does not require heating and melting the substrate. This process squishes a liquid polymer between the template and the substrate so that the polymer fills the gaps in the template. Then they cure the polymer with UV light, lift off the template and then more or less follow the standard etching process.
The first thing you would wonder about is problems with air gaps and bubbles but they say that this has not been a problem.
They also say that template lifetime does not appear to be an issue but they need to do a longer term study on this.
One of the bigger problems they were facing was pattern alignment because the liquid polymer acts as a lubricant and the template tends to slide around as its being pressed down. They say they have addressed this problem with more rigid and precise mechanics.
Its very interesting technology and its expected that this technology will begin showing up in corporate research fabs - rather than academic research - by next year.
The article states that the silicon wafer is melted briefly by a laser. Considering that the silicon wafers are actual single crystals, wont the melting and re-solidification of the silicon alter the properties of the wafer.
So instead of having a single crystal we could end up with many small crystals aligned along the features that we are creating. I am not sure how much the creation of semiconductors is dependant on having a single crystal, but if it is dependant then this new technique may not be that useful after all.
Isn't this one of the main problems chip-manufacturers have to deal with now that individual transistors are becoming so small?
:)
I'd imagine that the electron-migration with 10 nm transistors is pretty bad, not to mention the inferference between individual traces.
I could be horribly wrong, though. Anyone wants to hit me with a clue-stick?
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Yet you see all forms of industry cannibalize each other by spending exorbitant, but approximately equal amounts on game theory. They waste a ton of money, but the end up no better than if they spent no money on advertising. See Game Theory.
The observation that the computing power which can be incorporated in a given sized piece of silicon doubles roughly every 18 months was put forward by the head of Intel, Gordon Moore, in 1965. - BBC News.
We're probably 20 years ahead of the curve, - Professor Chou.
Seems a little exaggerated. Let's look at the numbers.
The article says they're 100x as dense (in area) as current technology.
if 2^7=128, then technology needs to double fewer than 7 times.
7 * 1.5 years = 10.5 years, far fewer than the claimed 20 years.
And this technology is still vaporware, so even 10.5 years is exaggerated.
Sounds cool, though. It would be nice if this really worked.
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Well, if that were true, why wouldn't AMD release it's Athlon XP 2500+ just so it could say it's slightly ahead of Intel. When AMD's fastest chip was faster that Intel's fastest chip that really helped AMD with it's sales even among the slower chips.
I'm sure AMD has *plans* for faster chips, and I'm sure they've even made and tested them. That doesn't mean they're ready for primetime.
I understand your reasoning, but an "electron laser" what they called it in the article that I read.
You are right about the vacuum. And my proposal of mesons would be even worse. But the question is, what are the alternatives. That's probably why this press & fit idea is going to get a good trial, even though it sounds off the wall.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
In the case of semiconductor technology, the die size is currently the limiting factor. I saw someone make a single atomic layer thick diode junction with Indium-Gallium-Arsenide on Silicon over a decade ago, using fairly basic equipment (a home made chemical vapour deposition setup) at a small university. Thickness isn't a problem - it's area. When we eventually hit nanotech, we'll see a lot of small versions of existing technology.
We do standard old fashioned i-line lithography (0.35m), old fashioned proximity lithography (1.5 m), decent laser direct write lithography (0.8 m) and top of the line e-beam direct write lithography ( 100 nm). The smaller the feature size gets, the more problems do we have with particles on the substrate, causing defects. Proximity lithography is suffering from defects caused by particles that form from the direct contact between the mask and the substrate. Thinking of an embossing method for resist patterning gives me a bad feeling about generated particles adhering to the stamp-mask. Especially at 10 nm feature size. Very questionable. Also, the wall angle of the patterned resist seems far off of the desired 90 degrees. The etch behaviour of such shallow slopes is difficult to control and leads to variance in etched feature size. This is an interesting lab experiment, but I cannot imagine it for high volume chip production at all.
True. Current transistor operation is statistical, so we need certain amount of electrons flowing from source to drain. If we make the gate thinner and thinner the rush will be like in tokyo subwaystation. This generates more collisions and heat no matter what you do. Still I think this business is just started.
hopey
There is no such thing as an "electron-beam laser." Lasers by definition emit photons, not electrons.
Anyway, any clean electron-beam process requires VACUUM, which increases cost and decreases throughput by at least one order of magnitude, often more.
Uh, you are aware they call it the electromagnetic spectrum? Electrons are really high-energy photons.
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and computer speed doubles every 39 fortnights.
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