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Bell Labs claims to have found new limit for chip size

Posted by Hemos on from the there's-plenty-of-room-at-the-bottom dept.

Nocturna writes "SiliconValley.com reports scientists at Bell Labs claim to have found a new limit on how small they can make chips, doubling the life left in silicon technology. " Essentially, what Bell Labs is saying that you can't go any smaller then 5 atoms of silicon dioxide at the heart of the machine. As before, they are saying that this the limit-although this time it may veryw ell be true, with current materials.

1 of 104 comments (clear)

  1. 3D chip designs by Christopher+Thomas · · Score: 5
    On a side note, why don't designers use 3D designs? It just seems like 2D transistor grids aren't the optimum. In 3d, the clock pulse would have a much shorter path to follow, allowing higher clock speeds.


    There are two obstacles that I can think of. The first is heat disspiation; heat will have to travel farther through the chip before reaching the surface. This could be ameliorated by putting sheets of thermally conducting material between layers, but this is complicated, and they'd have to be pretty thick (unless they were thermal superconductors; IIRC these exist at room temperature).


    The other obstacle is depositing a layer of crystalline silicon to make transistors with. Current wafers are still sliced from single crystals of silicon. However, silicon that is deposited tends to be polycrystalline. This gives it poor electrical properties.


    We'd either have to figure out how to grow or place single-crystal layers of silicon on to an outer oxide layer of a chip, or else figure out how to make fast circuitry with polycrystalline silicon.


    That having been said, this is an idea that I like very much. It is one of the logical ways of extending chips once linewidth reaches its limits.