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Scientists Pave Way For 25nm CPUs
arcticstoat writes in with word that scientists at the Space Nanotechnology Laboratory at MIT have found a new way of extending Moore's law into the future — they have succeeded in etching a grid of 25nm lines into a silicon wafer. The article notes that this technique could be used for writing the grid on which chips are laid down, but that the electronic elements would have to be written using more complex techniques. "[Researchers] created an interference pattern using light from a laser with a wavelength of 351 nm. The pattern consists of alternating light and dark zones repeating every 200 nm. This allowed them to etch 25-nm lines into a silicon wafer, each 175 nm apart. They then repeated the process three times, each time shifting the interference pattern by 50 nm and etching another 25-nm groove. The resulting grid has alternating 25-nm stripes and grooves..."
Altera (www.altera.com) are one of the many silicon companies announcing 42nm devices shipping in the next year or so. Xilinx fanboys - I'm sure they promise the same (picture an AMD/Intel bunfight if you will) - though I must confess I am friendly towards them as an ex employee of sorts, I am certain they are not the only ones proposing to produce devices at this process node in the near future. Intel and IBM being very much at the front of the curve, so to speak. The gap between theoretical limits being announced and actual manufacturing at the announced node seems to be getting a lot shorter. Is quantum really next, or is optical? As we get down to 32nm and beyond the so called 'moores law' (which seems only to really serve journalism as such ;) ) seems to really, genuinely be nearing the limits. What IS next after silicon transistors on a die? Gallium is supposedly running out (due to flat panels) and that's only a doping chemical for speed, still in the silicon domain, not a real sea change of technology. Whats going to happen to the size/power curve? Even multicore processors will suffer as long as they are still roadmapped out on the same substrate. Are we really running out of time now? I don't really hear of the 'next big thing' in any form other than conjecture at the moment..?
Not only did they make features smaller than the wavelength, they did it with a relatively simple and inexpensive setup. It would be interesting to see this combined with the memristor development in an attempt to create very cheap, high density storage or even cooler, hybrid analog/digital computers.
Exactly. And it is not only limited to the physical effects themselves, but also includes the limited capabilities of the modern design and verification software necessary to simulate these effects on any input of any pratical size in any practical time.
Designing these chips will be expensive. And that's exactly what Moore's Law is about. Not some stupid miniaturisation of the devices.
Here is a perspective on the size of these 25nm stripes and grooves. If a cross-hatch of these stripes and grooves done both vertically and horizontally each had a pixel of a picture placed on it, then the number of high definition 1920x1080 pictures you could fit in just one square millimeter would be 20.833 pictures wide by 37.037 pictures high, for an average of 771.605 pictures per square millimeter ... a half minute of video at 25 fps. For the metric challenged, that's 529.166 pictures wide by 940.741 pictures high, for an average of 497808.642 pictures per square inch ... over 4.6 hours of video at 30 fps.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
This will help us to get into the resolutions which will make graphene come alive for us. After all, its semiconductive properties only begin to happen at scales of 10nm or lower. I'm eagerly awaiting the graphene age to commence.