Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

IBM: Chip Making is Hitting Its Limits, But Our Techniques Could Solve That (zdnet.com)

Posted by msmash on from the hustle-ensues dept.

IBM has devised materials and processes that could help improve the efficiency of chip production at the 7nm node and beyond. From a report: The company's researchers are working on challenges in the emerging field of 'area-selective deposition', a technology that could help overcome limitations on lithographic techniques to create patterns on silicon in 7nm processes. Semi Engineering has a neat account of lithographic patterning and why at 7nm there's growing interest in area-selective deposition. Techniques such as 'multiple patterning' helped ensure integrated circuits kept scaling, but as chips have shrunk from 28nm to 7nm processes, chipmakers have needed to process more layers with ever-smaller features that need more precise placement on patterns. Those features need to align between layers. When they don't, it leads to 'edge placement error' (EPE), a challenge that Intel lithography expert Yan Borodovsky believed lithography couldn't solve and which would ultimately impede Moore's Law.

9 of 50 comments (clear)

  1. Uh... Wrong Problem IBM by rfengineer · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Figure out how to solve the quantum tunneling gate leakage power problem and you've got a winner. Photolithography has never been identified as a show stopper to continued gate shrinkage. Gate leakage at these dimensions is.

  2. This is one of those articles... by BringsApples · · Score: 4, Funny

    ...that, probably, only a few people here will understand. I'll simplify it:
    They want to work at a very small scale, using very big words. /s

    --
    Politics; n. : A religion whereby man is god.
  3. Perhaps improve software first by Viol8 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Instead of using lots of scripting languages and VM with frameworks that suck up huge volumes of memory and are so poorly written they require large amounts of CPU time to do very little, perhaps there should be a return to an emphasis on more effcient compiled languages that only use what resources they need at any given time.

    Yeah I know, get off my lawn etc. But that fact that script kiddy coders don't like being told that their toy language is a bloated CPU hogging mess doesn't change the reality of the situation.

    1. Re:Perhaps improve software first by Jeremi · · Score: 2, Insightful

      False choice detected.

      The beauty of more-efficient hardware is that it will improve the performance of all software -- bloated and non-bloated alike.

      In the meantime, there's no need to wait on IBM (or to demand that IBM wait on us) to start writing non-bloated software, we can start doing that today. With or without IBM's magic beans, anyone who does so gains a competitive advantage over those who do not.

      --


      I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
    2. Re:Perhaps improve software first by TheDarkMaster · · Score: 2

      This. I still remember when a browser (for example purposes) just needed a few MB to work (actually, mostly static pages and just a few simple javascripts but being honest did not needed much else). Now a browser to do the same job starts at over 256MB of RAM, which is more than most of the desktops of the era dreamed of having.

      --
      Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
    3. Re:Perhaps improve software first by TheDarkMaster · · Score: 4, Informative

      Optimization is not even the problem in most cases. I have seen idiots who, being unable to understand (or worse, not interested in learning) how to properly use the existing resources of the operating system, they decide to make their own frameworks/VMs and end up making a mess that uses three times more resources than the native operating system functions and with three times as many defects.

      --
      Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
  4. Reversible moon shot by cdibbs · · Score: 2

    I hope someone or many someones out there are working on reversible computing. It sounds like the only long-term way forward. https://spectrum.ieee.org/comp...

  5. Re:IBM : dead, iconic brand of a has been , like S by ogdenk · · Score: 2

    What did you do there AC? Empty trashcans or get coffee for people with a clue?

    Basic R&D is what got us the cool toys we have today. Companies doing research for the sake of research that may not be immediately profitable. This is what brought us wonderful things like the UNIX operating system and the microprocessor.

  6. Re:Meanwhile, TSMC are already working on 7nm by Solandri · · Score: 2

    nm aren't comparable between companies. Each foundry is referring to a different thing when they call their process "x nm".

    For example, TSMC's 7nm process yields 83 million transistors per mm^2. Meanwhile, the 10nm process Intel was working on yielded 100 million transistors per mm^2, indicating its average component size was smaller despite having a larger nm name. In fact, TSMC's 7nm process yields only twice the transistor density of Intel's 14nm process, not 4x as you'd expect if the nm were referring to the same thing.