Printing Chips

batty writes :"Nature has this article about a process that uses a quartz die and a laser to mechanically print features onto chips instead of photo-etching them. The article mentions engraving a silicon wafer with features only 10 nanometres in size, as opposed to 130 nanometres using photlithography, and the process is quicker, simpler, and more environmentally friendly than current processes. Which is nice."

Comments

Physical Laws

[Skiboo]

"It gives an unsurpassed combination of speed and resolution and isn't limited by physical laws."


Also, the tecnique will be used for a myriad of other things, including spaceships made entirely of silicon, allowing them to be freed from laws of gravity and friction.

Re:But how do you make the mold

[Drakin]

How long does a CD mold last?

Really, it should last a fair bit of time, quartz is durable. Rather hard, fairly high melting point points to it being ideal for this use.

Re:What about the other 20 layers, now?

[srmalloy]

You still have to connect the damn dots. And on top of that, your first metalization layer has to be the same "feature size" as your transistors (or else it can't connect them!). So unless they figure out how to get 10nm photo masking for metal deposition, or figure out some other way to put the first metal layer down at 10nm, this is useless.

-5, Clueless.

If you're using mechanical masking for all of the semiconductor layers, why would you suddenly turn brain-dead and use photo-masking for the metal layers?