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

Terrabyte drives not enough?

[syousef]

I just had 2 fail over the weekend. I didn't lose anything vital because I had backups but everything I considered non-essential is gone (mostly just lots of VMWare images of various distros). At some point it beocmes a bitch to manage so much data.

Re:that's great and all.

[Corwn of Amber]

Never. "Plasmonic Nanolithography"? Yeah, yeah, and I've got a machine that extracts OIL from SNAKES while producing more energy than it consumes.

When will they fire Roland? He never even posted anything remotely plausible.