Slashdot Mirror
Bright Peaks for Smaller Chips
Salden writes "University of Wisconsin scientists propose a way to create 20nm chip features. They were investigating the limits of X-ray lithography and discovered that they could control the phase of X-rays by adjusting the gap between a mask and wafer. Pretty cool."
Just when you think they couldn't get any smaller than those annoying crumbs in the bottom of the bag. Why doesn't anyone make large chips? That would be easier to grab and eat.
Lithography leap creates 20-nm chip features
By R. Colin Johnson
EE Times
January 17, 2003 (4:15 p.m. EST)
MADISON, Wis. -- Scientists at the
Recent Articles
Semiconductor
News
Startup opens China's first SOI wafer plant
U.S. relaxes export controls on microprocessors
Fairchild reports loss for 2002 as prices erode
Intel delays 64- bit processor to re-engineer part
Motorola pares plants, seeks 300-mm partner
STMicro to buy DSL chip developer Tioga
Archives
University of Wisconsin have found a way to create 20-nanometer chip feature sizes with 100-nm masks, giving an unexpected leap to Moore's Law and possibly extending the life of current lithography.
The so-called "bright-peak technology" adjusts the space between a mask and a wafer to control the phases of X-ray lithography. "We learned how to use phase- shifting to control diffraction -- a technique that works for X-rays or even traditional optical lithography," said professor Franco Cerrina, who created bright-peak enhanced X-ray phase-shifting masks with professor James Taylor and researcher Lei Yang at the Center for Nanotechnology here.
"With this bright-peak technology, you could write a 100-nanometer mask feature and wind up with a 20-nanometer chip feature," Taylor said. Such fine feature sizes are located at "about 2010" on the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors, he said.
The technology, developed in cooperation with the Synchrotron Radiation Center here, gives an eight-year leap to Moore's Law, the inventors said. Posited by Intel Corp. cofounder Gordon Moore, Moore's Law states that the number of transistors that can be placed on a chip will double every 18 months.
According to the University of Wisconsin inventors, today's chips that use 248-nm or 193-nm photomasks can only attain features as small as 100 nm in the photoresist layer of a chip. Common industry wisdom holds that chip makers will have to abandon lenses to focus light through masks onto a chip at dimensions below 100 nm, and will instead require special mirrors, since quartz lenses absorb too much light to go to sub-100 nm.
The Wisconsin inventors discovered the bright-peak mask technology while exploring the limits of X-ray lithography. They found that diffraction was the major factor preventing light from getting through the smaller features on a mask. Mask makers already tinker with masks to let more light through, but the inventors discovered they could control the phase of X-rays by adjusting the gap between a mask and wafer. The patent for their work is held by the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation.
Bright-peak masks work by positioning adjacent phase-shifting features so that light at the edges of small lines is bent by interference back toward the center of the line -- the namesake for "bright peak" because the center of all the small lines become illuminated. As a result, chips features can be honed down sixfold compared to masks without the phase-shifting gaps.
Taylor is currently characterizing the bright-peak masks for optimal resolution, sensitivity and long-term stability as determined by manufacturing parameters such as thickness of mask material, phase angle, wavelength of exposing light, resist material, and size of desired features.
A drawn 20nm process will have an even shorter gate height. What would we be down to then? ~1-4 silicon atoms? This would force the operating voltatge to be lowered even more, possibly approaching Vt. (I forget exactly but around ~0.7V)
I'm not saying that we'll never have a 20nm process, we will. But there is going to be quite a bit more involved than figuring out how to mask the waffer. i.e. double gates, etc.
So when I had 6 weeks of radation therapy they could have been building a chip out of my own tissue to track me! That's all I needed to know. Packing bags for Idaho ASAP
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
What I'd be really interested in is what will be next in chip design. At one point traditionally designed chips will be at a single (or a few atoms per transistor) and shielding from natural radiation will be an issue, just as an example.
Even if this wouldn't be an issue (I'm no expert,) there will be a physical limit.
It seems that new designs are overdue. Quantum computers maybe?
There are fewer illiterates than people who can't read.
Moore's law would appear to be alive and well.
Amazing magic tricks
It seems that new designs are overdue.
That might come from Elbrus
Seems like an interesting article, especially the part about IA-64 and Transmeta.
FRA: STFU GTFO
Screw this Slashdot shit -- it's a cold Saturday afternoon here in the UK and I can't be arsed watching lame Slashbots suck more karma. Slash is pretty shit of late; all the dupes, errors and generally crap stories are becoming a pain.
:)
So let's just talk about something else -- what about that RMS personal ad eh? Good luck to the man, gotta say. He may be a bit overactive in his faith sometimes but still, we gotta say thanks for GCC, glibc and Emacs.
Anyone else playing GTA3 a lot recently? Guess some of you PS2 owners are enjoying Vice City... can't wait for the PC version so I can download some mods
Anyway, time to download the latest AbiWord.
Oh, and to the newbie moderators, don't waste your mod points on clearly offtopic crap like this -- mod GOOD posts UP. This is already 0 and will not be archived, so don't waste your time.
-- Bored Guy
why is it there are so few comments in every threads of slashdot in the last hours ?
Moderators: Don't agree? pray tell why.
Check this paper out for details: End of Moore's law: thermal (noise) death of integration in micro and nano electronics
This might also bring totaly new prospects to the approach applied in Transmeta's Crusoe.
-- Contradictions only exist in thought - not in reality.
Numerical already developed phase-shift mask tech (http://www.siliconstrategies.com/story/OEG2001042 3S0029). Note that they could use 248nm tech to make 25nm features in 2001. Intel apparently licensed it 2 years ago!!!
-----------------------
To understand recursion, one must first understand recursion.
Perhaps to overcome bit errors from radiation (natural or otherwise) we will end up with lots of error-correcting circuitry on chip. I believe that heavy-duty devices such as IBM's Power4 does.
So we might end up with several ALUs on chip and a majority vote for the correct answer?
Besides, the complexity of modern CPUs are already creating lots of problems which have to be solved today - eg: power and clock distribution. Both might be made easier with asynchronous logic but the only real investor/researcher in async is Sun Microsystems.
Doubtless there is a huge amount of pressure for more CPU/RAM/etc... The majority will need it to run the latest MSFT Windows/Office combo at a fast enough speed to cope with someone typing at 25WPM or more... So one way or another, this technology will find its way into production, perhaps within the next 8 years.
-- The universe began. Life started on a billion worlds...
-- Except on one where stupidity was there first.
Ooh, mommy, mommy, what I have now doesn't work in this extremely
unlikely circumstance, so I'll just throw it away and write something
completely new.
-- Linus Torvalds
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...