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Research Discovery Could Revolutionize Semiconductor Manufacturing
New submitter arobatino writes "A new method of manufacturing semiconductors which eliminates the substrate (in other words, no wafer) could be much faster and cheaper. From the article: 'Instead of starting from a silicon wafer or other substrate, as is usual today, researchers have made it possible for the structures to grow from freely suspended nanoparticles of gold in a flowing gas. "The basic idea was to let nanoparticles of gold serve as a substrate from which the semiconductors grow. This means that the accepted concepts really were turned upside down!" Since then, the technology has been refined, patents have been obtained and further studies have been conducted. In the article in Nature, the researchers show how the growth can be controlled using temperature, time and the size of the gold nanoparticles.'"
That is like 1950's technology levels. A long time before they can make million gate devices.
There are many many problems associated with replicating sub-nanometer scale patterns on a ground flat substrate. If they don't have a planaer substrate they are going to have lots of problems creating the required imaging patterns. Note that at the current scales you can't print a | object as a simple | you have to make it look like an I, essentially doing what is called dog-boneing because of eteching and diffraction effects. And multiple parallel lines have big problems with diffraction effects.
So currently it seems without a substrate then can make ...... a single p- or n- type semiconuctor material that is unsuitable for anything else.
gold is a very severe contaminant for silicon, and many other semiconductors.
It sits energy wise in the center of the band gap and kills mobility with traps.
Gold is rigorously excluded from silicon FABS, not even let in the same room.
as described by Reuters at http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/11/27/us-amd-blackfriday-idUSBRE8AQ12I20121127
Well, you were wondering, right?
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
...but if they really manage to make circuits I am really impressed.
Otherwise I think they'll have trouble selling these things.
...if you believe your new process/material can be developed to the point where it can compete with traditional silicon devices and/or processing methods you are wrong.
Only if you have an application, such as LEDs where the laws of physics say silicon can't possibly compete is there any chance you will succeed. And even then the chances are you are still wrong.
namgge
> patents have been obtained
I guess it won't revolutionize anything after all; or at least not for another 20 years.
This is very cool, but it's got a really long way to go before it can be used to build anything remotely like an integrated circuit. I'm also not sure the benefit will be that large since the wafer cost isn't a very big part of the cost of making integrated circuits today. What I think it can be great for is solar cells, nanotubes and other products where getting rid of the wafer will solve two problems: the cost and the size. If you can make an arbitrarily large solar cell panel, that's a real advantage over wafer-based manufacturing methods.
There will be at least one time that some other process came from nowhere and beat silicon litography in nealy all aspects. (The laws of physics almost assure that.)
The only questions are "when?", "what process?" and "will it come while we still have Moore's law?"
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means more gold in my bucket
ive got several ounces saved up already all of it from chips and circut boards. the only problem is finding a reputable HONEST buyer near my home
i have to send it too illinois from california as it is, and i always stress out during shipping that something will happen
im sure these guys will figurre out how to minimize the gold usage but untill they find a happy spot they always go overboard
more power to them
Silicon is still used in high power LED's. Cree use silicon carbide.
Next thing ya know, they are going to 'invent' a 'processor' that is free of mass, tethered to electricity or energy....
And they're going to call it Skynet.
Why, because OHH that's NEVER been done before...
Cmon. How long's this cycle gonna continue, guys? We've been down this road before.
We're all Source Code, WE GET IT ALREADY!
That seems much more feasible than what is implied by the title of this post.
This article wins today's coveted "Most Hyperbolic Headline" award. First off, here's the actual link, for those of you with access to Nature: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature11652.html
To understand what the big deal is here, compare baking cookies in your house to a fancy industrial setup: In your home oven you can bake around 20 cookies at once, and you have to put them on a tray. Meanwhile, an industrial bakery has one of those fancy conveyor belt ovens -- dough goes in one side, cookies come out the other, and the conveyor belt itself is the tray. The conventional fabrication process for metallic nanostructures is more like the home method -- you need a tray (usually a silicon substrate, because those are pretty cheap and extremely high-quality), and an reactor of some sort (in this case a really fancy oven that costs more than your car, but still an oven), and you won't be getting any nanowidgets until the kitchen timer dings.
What this will NOT be useful for is logic circuitry. This group has managed to come up with a pretty good method of manufacturing metallic nanorods. That's all well and good, but bear in mind that all of these high quality nanorods are not attached to anything, and not particularly useful in and of themselves. Perhaps they can make individual nanorods into diodes, but even if they do they're still left with essentially a disordered heap of unconnected devices -- try throwing ten toothpicks in the air and having them land in a perfect grid. Now do it for a billion tiny transistors. You may notice that this process does not scale well.
This manufacturing method might actually be more useful in the realm of optics. The real breakthrough here is the fact that high quality metallic nanostructures can be grown without a substrate, and can be grown quickly and continuously. Metallic spheres and rods are actually quite interesting at the nanoscale, and behave in very counterintuitive ways (for instance, suspensions of gold spheres take on very different colors when viewed with reflected vs. transmitted light (See for instance the Lycurgus cup: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lycurgus_Cup). People are working away on using those properties to do something more useful than making a better shot glass (for instance, nanostructured metals show some promise at enhancing the efficiency of solar cells), and maybe this manufacturing method will help them out by bringing the cost of high quality research materials down.
Then again, maybe all we'll get is a few overblown press releases and another three weeks of this article on the front page at Slashdot.
" "will it come while we still have Moore's law?""
we don't have it now. Haven't for years. as a reminder: Double the transistors for half the price per cm2.
When was the last time the number of transistors per cm2 doubles in 18 months? 2203? 2004?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
There will be at least one time that some other process came from nowhere and beat silicon litography in nealy all aspects. (The laws of physics almost assure that.)
Not so sure about that. Lithography is one of the most highly developed technologies in the history of the world, and has gone far, far deeper than most people expected as early as the 1980s. Proposal after proposal has been made to replace lithography (e.g. e-beam, MBE, etc) but all have to relegated to niche status.
Semiconductor lithography itself is highly, highly leveraged from printing processes going back hundreds of years. With this much brain power and inertia behind it I would be really, really surprised if something beats it in "nearly all aspects". Some aspects, maybe, and lithography may finally hit a show-stopper, but there won't be an "oh my, what a breakthrough" type thing to replace it. I agree it has to be replaced to maintain Moore's law, but it is already beyond comprehension advanced.
There are three periods in an ellipsis. Three.
Lemme see ... 28days X 3 ... an ellipsis is equal to 84 days?
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Anything that makes Internet porn viewing cheaper is OK by me.
When was the last time the number of transistors per cm2 doubles in 18 months? 2203? 2004?
Actually, it's every 2 years. The 18 month period was from David House and referred to computing power (due to the combination of transister count increasing and speed increasing).
And the answer to your question would appear to be 2011 :)
Igor Presnyakov stole my hat
Does my board need to be suspended in a vacuum chamber with a free floating gas substrate so that I can connect this to the rest of the parts?
xkcd Researcher Translation
Lithography is one of the most highly developed technologies in the history of the world, and has gone far, far deeper than most people expected
Except, of course, when it comes to lithography of ink on paper. In print media, it is being dumped in favor of a more flexible and far cheaper disruptive technology.
It's not per cm2. It's per chip. Highter yelds are also part of Moore's law.
The law is as strong as ever, and probably will hold until the next fabs generation (about 7 years). After that, it's only guesses.
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