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Melting Microchip Defects May Extend Moore's Law
schliz lets us know about research out of Princeton on melting away defects on microchips using a laser. The new technique, termed Self-Perfection by Liquefaction (SPEL), was published in the May 4 issue of Nature Nanotechnology. Researchers have traditionally approached chip defects by trying to improve the microchip fabrication process, but this eventually reaches fundamental physical limits to do with random behavior of electrons and photons. By focussing on fixing defects, the new method enables more precise shaping of microchip components, and engineers expect to dramatically improve chip quality without increasing fabrication cost. The before-and-after images are remarkable. Here's a diagram of how the process works.
Whew yeah, those are amazing. World-changing, even.
What am I looking at?
Where do the frikin' sharks come in to it?
Is crushing a suspect's child's testicles illegal?
John Yoo: "No, [if] the President thinks he needs to do that."
Is that image in actual size or what?
162*169?
Very strange indeed.
Baboons are cute.
here is a larger version
here... http://www.princeton.edu/pr/pictures/a-f/chou/Chou_micrographs.jpg
better link: http://www.princeton.edu/pr/pictures/a-f/chou/
I was imagining a laser doing touchups on really bad places of the chip to remove shortcircuits and stuff like that. But this seems like another step in the process of making chips.
A bit like drying pulp to get paper.
Scientists really need to stop using lasers to fix microchips and start using them for something practical.
For instance, death rays.
The described process seems to bring essentially correct structures into a more regular shape by melting them and letting surface tension do the rest.
I doubt it could fix a "real" defect, like two neighboring structures that were fused by accident during manufacturing.
C - the footgun of programming languages
How much funding do these people get ?
... the original was bigger than 162 x 169 pixels also ;-)
It's obvious they've just used the BBC testcard and Photoshopped out the girl, clown and blackboard.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/cult/classic/classic/images/640/testcard.jpg
Stands out a mile, obvious fake
Someone who understands both should comment on how similar this process is to annealing.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Here's a link to the non-thumbnail version of before and after. I couldn't see anything on my 17" 1920x1200. http://www.princeton.edu/pr/pictures/a-f/chou/Chou_micrographs.jpg
I'm a materials scientist, so hopefully I can explain this quickly for you all :)
:)
The images that are given (before and after) are some scanning electron microscope images. Think optical microscope except with electrons. Anyway, there is a serious improvement in the structure - the edges are a lot cleaner and more defined. This is a really simple and beautiful way of letting Nature do the hard work for us. What this is doing is liquifing the material and letting surface tension pull it into the lowest-energy configuration (least amount of surface area locally).
It's really a neat way of doing it, because fabrication is really tough - uses either chemical etching or some method of particle bombardment to remove atoms. There's a big trend in matsci to build down, and build up, at the same time at the nanoscale. Think of this as the "error-correction" process after fabrication.
--This is not the same as annealing - annealing is a solid-state process, putting energy into the material to enable atoms to move and remove stress and other small defects from the material.
Hope that helps
So this kinda feels like solder rework but on die with semiconductor instead of solder. Silicon reflow.
The final link in the summary shows a diagram of how it works. The second 'capped' example shows a load of messy green lines that have some rather neat blue lines placed over the top of them to produce some red hot neat lines that cool to form nice neat green lines.
Rather than doing all that, whatever process they used to make the nice neat blue lines should be used to make the green ones in the first place.
Am I the only one that is completely confused?
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... but made with lasers!
How cool is THAT?
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
They spelled liquifaction correctly.
Finally, the CS way of developing is extending to other areas.
Soon architects will quickly make ten buildings without much previous study, then sell those who don't fall in the first two weeks with the promise that if some fall in the first five years, they'll release a v2.0 shaped as the ones still standing.
I can almost see the changelog:
"v1.5.1142 - The coming of winter discovered a weakness against rain in paper roof. New ice roof installed."
When fabricating chips, yes, you do want nice clean lines. Whopeee for clean lines. All hail clean lines. By coincidence, surface tension works towards cleaning up lines. Somebody should have patented surface tension. Too late now.
But eventually the nice clean lines end up at a transistor or resistor. There the rules are very different. You don't want surface tension to do its thing on the end of the line, which would be to shorten it. Very conveniently these nice pictures don't show what happens at the end of each line. How convenient.
Hang on a second. A little random wiggling in a "wire" does no real harm -- it lengthens the path a little, maybe introduces a little more heating, but the electrons still go where they're supposed to.
The problem comes when the random wiggles cause two wires to touch, creating a short. Then you've got an actual dead chip.
But if this self-perfection thing works the way I think it does, it should cause that "bridge" to become stronger, just as two drops of water on a window merge when they touch.
Doesn't sound too useful to me!
I can tell you that reworking products takes three times as long, and therefore costs three times as much money, as doing it right the first time. This is because you have to build the defective product the first time, detect the defect, and repair the defect. The time and money spent on this research is better spent on getting the original manufacturing process under better control.
Don't blame me. Deming said it first.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
Now! From electronic researchers at the Princeton University, comes... Self-Perfection by Liquefaction! (public oohs)
... not 1,000, not 500, not 100, but a mere $9.95!
Testimony: "I was a lousy CPU, i overheated and it was exhausting. But when I tried Self-Perfection by Liquefaction, my life changed".
(Shows picture of before / after)
(public wows and applauds)
And this perfection can only be yours by the mere price of
CALL NOW!
One of the major problems with getting linewidth (and thus line separation) down in the photoresist process is the problem of dielectric breakdown. Charge builds up at the irregular surface and if two points on different conductng lines are near one another they will arc across and the chip will be useless (same reason arc lamp electrodes are shaped as needles). This process seems to remove the irregularities, which should allow chip fab units to lay down pathways closer together. Note even the square spots get round(liquids form spheres to reduce surface area) which reduces the tendency for breakdown to occur. If nothing else could allow for the use of lower dielectric packaging, and make things cheaper.
Really cool.
quote from article:
Simple melting by direct heating has previously been shown to smooth out the defects in plastic structures.
This process can't be applied to a microchip for two reasons. First, the key structures on a chip are not made of plastic, which melts at temperatures close to the boiling point of water, but from semiconductors and metals, which have much higher melting points.
Heating the chip to such temperatures would melt not just the structures, but nearly everything else on the chip. Second, the melting process would widen the structures and round off their top and side surfaces, all of which would be detrimental to the chip.
Chou's team overcame the first obstacle by using a [...] laser [...] because it heats only a very thin surface layer of a material and causes no damage to the structures underneath. The researchers carefully designed the pulse so that it would melt only semiconductor and metal structures, and not damage other parts of the chip. The structures need to be melted for only a fraction of a millionth of a second, because molten metal and semiconductors can flow as easily as water and have high surface tension, which allows them to change shapes very quickly.
That's pretty amazing, that the semiconductor and metal self-correct via surface tension, and by using a directed laser pulse so you only affect specific areas of the chip.
maybe they'll extend this First Proof-of-concept to the 45nm scale, but their demo. is already at 70nm (lines) and 50nm (dots).
the lines demonstration is a big deal to Intel's optical waveguiding, as it'll reduce the sidewall scattering loss of the waveguides considerably. I'd imagine the dots would be great for transistor gates.
Moore's Law reminds me of Weird Al Yankovic. Every few years, someone proclaims that it's making a "comeback". The reality is, of course, that Moore's Law was never gone in the first place.
You Really MUST be New Here.
There goes my Kharma...
Now it's back to Dharma
One of my dozens of hobbyist hats is my glassworkers hat and annealing is a big deal in glasswork. From my experience with glass, I would say that annealing is probably the wrong term because this involves an actual deformation. Typically in annealing you want to stay below the point at which deformation occurs and your main concern is to create a gradual change in the temperature over time in order to eliminate internal stresses. So that's probably not the best word to use in this case since this is not about alleviating internal stresses but actual changes in the shape of the product.
This obsession with "Moore's Law" is detrimental to accurately judging semiconductor progress. It's an arbitrary and irrelevant benchmark.
"The structures need to be melted for only a fraction of a millionth of a second,"
wow and i thought I was fast.... TFA suggests that 'correction' could be automatic, although they used an electron microscope to fix chips, I'm guessing that the laser could simply be provided with the chip map, fire the laser along the parts that need to be fixed to make the chip work, (with the quartz either touching the chip, or slightly above it, the slightly above it making the lines narrow and tall a desirable trait for chips) well, if it really works without checking the chip optically to program the the laser, then it could easily be used soon, and make faster chips for everyone.
very cool, and yet another technology thanks to our 'national defense' budget...
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html