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.'"

Comments

Fragility

[Renraku]

A question for the physics people out there.

At what point does Brownian motion become a serious consideration? What about tunneling electrons and other quantum-ish effects?

Re:Fragility

[mehtars]

Actually with processors using a 90 and 45 nanometer transistor size, there is a very high likely hood that a number of transistors will fail over the lifetime of the chip due to diffusion alone. Though modern processors have taken care of this by routing data through parts of the chip that are still active. Though this has an interesting affect of slowing the processor down as it gets older.