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100x Denser Chips Possible With Plasmonic Nanolithography
Roland Piquepaille writes "According to the semiconductor industry, maskless nanolithography is a flexible nanofabrication technique which suffers from low throughput. But now, engineers at the University of California at Berkeley have developed a new approach that involves 'flying' an array of plasmonic lenses just 20 nanometers above a rotating surface, it is possible to increase throughput by several orders of magnitude. The 'flying head' they've created looks like the stylus on the arm of an old-fashioned LP turntable. With this technique, the researchers were able to create line patterns only 80 nanometers wide at speeds up to 12 meters per second. The lead researcher said that by using 'this plasmonic nanolithography, we will be able to make current microprocessors more than 10 times smaller, but far more powerful' and that 'it could lead to ultra-high density disks that can hold 10 to 100 times more data than today's disks.'"
At about 5nm. Other effects should limit our current tech to about 10nm.
If "10 times smaller" is about chip area, then it might be possible - square root of 10 is about 3 and our current best lithography processes are about 30nm.
And artificial intelligence. That's always 20 years away.
No, it starts off at 20 years away and gets closer, and once it's less than 5 or 10 years away, someone redefines it and it's back to 20.