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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.
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.
He should have known what he was looking at just from the summary, but I agree that people should RTFA before they ask silly questions.
It's really quite an impressive difference, the before and after shots.
"Whatever made you ask this question?"
People generally ask questions to get answers. You, however, seem to ask questions to make other people feel stupid.
It gets hot and the defects get smoothed out.
I'm pretty sure that annealing changes the microstructure of a piece of metal (it doesn't change the form at a macro scale, but the internal structure changes), and the changes that this process makes seem to be occurring at a similar scale to recrystallization.
As far as why, I think it's interesting to look for parallels in the cutting edge of technology and ancient trade craft.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
So this kinda feels like solder rework but on die with semiconductor instead of solder. Silicon reflow.
Then you're much more forgiving than most people.
If a chip is designed to run at a certain speed, but manufacturing flaws make it run slower, then it a very real sense the chip didn't work. The fact that it still is possible to use the chip for some things doesn't mean that it's not broken.
I once rode home a bike that had one of the pedals broken off. It took longer than usual, because I was travelling at a lower speed, but by your definition my bike didn't have a defect. In my opinion, a missing pedal is pretty darn broken.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
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!
But also, the nice part of their process is that you can direct the lasers to certain areas of the chip.
I agree they should show the ends, but you could possibly use the directed laser pulse to stay away from the terminals.
Yes, if only you had a precision optical heating device which could be masked off to only cook the long wires, and skip the transistors. Such as a high energy laser, as described in the article.