Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
brownian motion isnt really relevant at this level, but i imagine that if the channel or 'wires' or whatever were close enough then tunneling could be an issue, but probability of tunneling falls off exponentially with the distance, and the severity depends on the energy, but if the wires are put close enough then it could be an issue, however only if there was just few atoms between channels
Was this developed at the Gizmonic Institute?
jsut athnoer menagiensls ltitle psrhae for you to dcoede. Why do we wtsae our tmie dnoig tihs?
You have to make a difference between Fabs which produce ICs and companies that produce Fab equimpent. Off course they're intertwined but AMD and the likes is an architecture Co, where Companies like ASML drive Fab technology. The "slow rate" is set by industry agreements - milestones - to keep the cost of Fab tech R&D minimal. The shrink step is a factor 2 for surface, resulting in a factor sqrt(2) for feature size. Litho tech companies use this step because the market is not viable for developing Fab tech which takes a different approach: litho is just a fraction in the hundreds of steps it takes to produce an IC. If you were to implement a new Fab litho technique which differs from the roadmap you won't have customers because the technology isn't in sync with the other processes. In other words: this new technology is only viable if the others jump on the bandwagon, so far it's "only" proof of concept. The field of Fab tech R&D is filled with new concepts, but that's just a small part of the story.
"Violence is the last refuge of the competent, and, generally, the first refuge of the incompetent" - Thing_1
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.
Tunneling electrons and other quantum effects are already in effect in current devices. We just design around those effects instead of taking advantage of them currently. When we really get the ability to make reliable 5nm size scale parts, we'll just switch to quantum dot based transistors (single electron transistors).
Brownian motion isn't relevent here.
A big issue is that sharp features are thermodynamically unstable (lots of dangling surface bonds), so edges tend to "soften" over time due to surface diffusion. Also, at ohmic contacts you can get pits forming which can eventually degrade features.
Another issue is that at the size scales we're talking about, current insulators stop working. They're looking at switching to a variety of new materials for this purpose (for example, IrO2), but these are tricky. This is what they mean when they say "high dielectric constant" materials. Every MOS transistors has a this oxide layer (between the Metal and the Semiconductor), and that layer's thickness defines many of the physical properties of the device.
Finally, you have to worry about inductors to a lesser extent. Current inductors aren't quite good enough, but we're working on that too =) Nanoscale metallic alloys are definitely the way to go.
In any event, this article is sort of sensationalist (surprise!). I was able to make 20nm features using physical embossing (stamping metal liquid precursors with a plastic stamp and then curing them) back in 2002. Making features of small size scale is easy, it's keeping error rate, making interconnects, etc that's hard and annoying. Plasmonics is very neat though, I can imagine it working with time.
Besides, hard disks already have magnetic domains of ~ only a few nanometers anyway.
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,1994121,00.asp
Here is an article on it. Although its from 2006, there has been more work done on it. There are more articles on it in the literature.
If you search for 'self healing' microprocessors you can find a number of articles on it.
Don't forget the space elevator, which, according to the late Arthur C. Clarke will get built 50 years after it stops getting modded funny.
I'm a sci-fi vegan: I don't want the aliens to think we have as much right to live as the fried chickens we eat.