100x Denser Chips Possible With Plasmonic Nanolithography 117
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.'"
that's great and all. (Score:3, Insightful)
The problem is this: when will it be cheap enough to be used as a process for the chips we use now?
Isn't quantum effect the main problem now? (Score:3, Insightful)
I thought that the real problem now wasn't our ability to get feature sizes small, but rather that at those sizes, quantum effects really start to matter.
So how does being able to produce such small features really help us?
Re:Fragility (Score:5, Insightful)
At about 5nm. Other effects should limit our current tech to about 10nm.
If "10 times smaller" is about chip area, then it might be possible - square root of 10 is about 3 and our current best lithography processes are about 30nm.
Re:Plasmonic nanolithography? (Score:4, Insightful)
What exactly is the problem with this term? Just too "fancy" and "technical" for you salt of the earth Anonymous Cowards? It makes perfect sense if you know the root words for it, and it succinctly describes the technology:
- Plasmonic: Of or using plasmons. [wikipedia.org]
- Nano-: At the nanometer scale of operation
- Lithography: Lithography [wikipedia.org].
Maybe you can argue that the "nano" is superfluous, but it captures one of the two things that are significant about the new technique -- it uses plasmons instead of traditional light, and it can theoretically operate at a scale as small as 5-10 nm. ("Nano-" seems to be more significant, when you're at the point where you're talking single-digit nanometer resolution.)
Just because it's long and wordy doesn't mean that it's Star Trek nonsense. The phrase has a useful meaning.
Re:5-10 years (Score:5, Insightful)
And artificial intelligence. That's always 20 years away.
No, it starts off at 20 years away and gets closer, and once it's less than 5 or 10 years away, someone redefines it and it's back to 20.
Re:Fragility (Score:3, Insightful)
So bit rot is real now? Argh.
Well, at least I can put it back on the excuse calendar.
Re:Impact on Big chip manufacturers (Score:4, Insightful)
A .sig comment:
I've always had trouble with this quote. "Last refuge" means, basically, "after trying all else, we do this."
Therefore, I would state that violence is the last refuge of the competent, and, generally, the first refuge of the incompetent.