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

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.

Comments

Uh... Wrong Problem IBM

[rfengineer]

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.

This is one of those articles...

[BringsApples]

...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

Perhaps improve software first

[Viol8]

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.

Re:Perhaps improve software first

[TheDarkMaster]

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.