Semiconductor Technologies Guide

An anonymous reader writes "X-bit labs have posted an interesting article on manufacturing technologies used in the semiconductor industry. Good reading if you want to get a really indepth idea of technologies used for semiconductor manufacturing by IBM, Intel, AMD, and others."

Comments

Nano-tube technology and it's application:

[antispamist]

Can carbon nanotube be used in CPU production? From what I understand some are conductive with low radiation and others are excellent insulators.

The article talks about "spontaneous electron movement from the negatively charged silicon substrate of the channel to the positively charged gate."

I guess I am just curious as I recently wrote a paper on their applications and I would like to hear from someone a little more technically knowledgable than me. Anyone have any real knowledge or some *easy* links they could share?

etching

[romit_icarus]

I used to be part of the surface physics research community that looked into how to etch more finer than we currently do so. Saw this so I thought I'd add the little I learnt there.

Conventional etching uses plasma. Plasma is a soup of charged particles of energy of the order of a kev (1000 electron volts). It's use is mostly dictated by the fact that we understand how to create it quite well, rather than in our understanding of what is/are the consituents of plasma that actually effect the etching action.

What is found that the etching process sensitive to the charge element, to the quantum state of the incident ions, to its energy, to the angle of incidence. And of course this is purely from the beam side, from the surface point of view there are a lot more variables...

Did you know that the molecular process that does etching is very similar to that that creates a radio blackout in the space shuttle while reentry? Somewhat cool