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10GHz Processors and Ultraviolet Lithography 200

Posted by CmdrTaco from the i'll-believe-it-when-i-can-crack-keys-on-it dept.
hoyosa writes "This article on zd-net reports that Extreme Ultraviolet LLC has built the first ultraviolet lithography stand for manufacturing processors. Will this make silicone obsolete? " Some interesting bits in there. Also "Soon" means we won't see actual chips until oh, say 2005, so don't hold your breath or anything.
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10GHz Processors and Ultraviolet Lithography More

10GHz Processors and Ultraviolet Lithography

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  • If the chip industry gets out of silicon, then the demand will decrease and prices will increase for some of silicons other "uses" we could all be effected

    • Re:What will super models do? (Score:3, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      "Will this make silicone obsolete?"

      Silicone, used in breast implants, will NEVER become obsolete, as long there breathes horney men everywhere!

      Silcon, on the other hand, may be superseded by some other material as a semiconductor.

      Heh!

  • Silicone Obsolete? (Score:5, Funny)

    by spoonboy42 ( 146048 ) on Sunday January 13, 2002 @01:26PM (#2832862)
    Egads, I hope not! It's my favorite synthetic rubber!
    • the adult film industry will make sure it that it does become obsolete it's only because it's been replaced with something better
    • Actually, it's not a typo. UV lithography will make silicone breast implants obsolete, because it will allow computers to get good enough to render full 3d holographic porn at a zillion frames per second.
  • No, this does not have anything to do with breast implants, but it WILL make silicon obsolete.

  • Moore's law (Score:1, Redundant)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Moore's Law, formulated by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore, states that the number of transistors a chip can hold will double every 18 to 24 months, as transistor size shrinks. More transistors, which switch off and on to represent binary data, lead to a corresponding leap in performance.

    The lithography technique now used, called deep ultraviolet, will suffice for one or two more generations of manufacturing processes, down to chip features the size of 100 nanometers, or one-tenth of a micron. Chipmakers are working on switching to 0.13-micron processes.

    As chipmakers reduce sizes below 100 nanometers, a new lithography technology will be needed--because as chip features decrease in size, the wavelength of light used in the lithography process must also be decreased. Deep ultraviolet lithography uses a wavelength of 240 nanometers. EUV uses a much shorter wavelength.

    Without a next-generation lithography technology like EUV, chip manufacturers, including AMD and Intel, would hit a wall in 2004 or 2005, when they would be unable to produce faster chips.

    • Re:Moore's law (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Redundent and probably plagarism. This was in the article.. word for word.. mod down.

  • Huh? (Score:2, Redundant)

    by Bruce Perens ( 3872 )
    Why would ultraviolet lithography make silicone obsolete :-)

    Would not UV lithography work on silicon?

    Bruce

    • The problem that chip manufacturers have been having with the much wanted, useful swithch to other materials is that the processes developed so far are for silicon. with a new method, they would just develop applications for other metals, and it wouldn't just be crappy low end chips in other metals, but a good new etching process.
    • Why would ultraviolet lithography make silicone obsolete :-)
      I won't go into the details, but it is somehow related to computer generated porn.

    • *shakes head*

      Shouldn't there be some sort of requirement that the submitter of an article at least sort of understand what it says?

  • love this quote: (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Stone Rhino ( 532581 )
    "The fastest PC processors today top out just above 1GHz." um... I assume they don't realize that the fastest are BELOW 1 ghz (risc, itanium, etc.)

  • Silicone, silicon (Score:5, Informative)

    by KFury ( 19522 ) on Sunday January 13, 2002 @01:31PM (#2832882) Homepage
    UV lithography has nothing to do with silicon (or silicone, for that matter...)

    It just means using light with a shorter wavelength to etch the silicon wafer, allowing you to use a smaller micron process than you could with longer wavelengths.

    You'd still use silicon for the wafer. To say otherwise is like saying that deisel fuel makes cars obsolete. They're entirely different problems.
    • It just means using light with a shorter wavelength to etch the silicon wafer, allowing you to use a smaller micron process than you could with longer wavelengths.

      Actually the light is just used to "expose" the photoresist to pattern your wafer (Si, GaAs, etc). Depending on the type of your resist (negative or positive) the exposed areas of the resist either solidifies or solubilizes and when you develop it in the appropriate developer you are left with your pattern on the wafer. The etching is done later using the photoresist as a mask to cover areas you don't want etched.

      ---
    • You'd still use silicon for the wafer. To say otherwise is like saying that deisel fuel makes cars obsolete. They're entirely different problems.

      I think it is more like saying "Fuel injector will make gas obsolete". Or maybe foam injection molding (of steel rather then die cast) will make use of steel obsolete...

  • Arrgghhh (Score:3, Funny)

    by ka9dgx ( 72702 ) on Sunday January 13, 2002 @01:31PM (#2832884) Homepage Journal
    I can't believe our fearless leader would make such an error as to swap Hollywood (Silicone Hills) with San Jose (Silicon Valley)... but, alas... it is Sunday, and perhaps he's tired. ;)

    --Mike--

  • old news (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    That article is over a year old
    • I noticed that too. It really makes you wonder why this stuff gets posted as news. I'm tempted to blame the poster, but then I thought, hey--it's the editors who are getting paid for hanging around on Slashdot. They should be the ones who do some checking. With the X-box emulator hoax yesterday and all the double-posts of earlier, it really makes you wonder why VA thinks they earn their money, and yet engineers deserve to be fired. This is especially stark when we cosider there are many competent volunteers who would gladly take over the editor roles. This isn't anything personal against the editors (hey, I also get lazy on the job sometimes), but I'd be much happier to see VA money do more to support Sourceforge and talented coders rather than these self-appointed geek-monarchs.
  • From the article: The fastest PC processors today top out just above 1GHz.

    I think I speak for us all when I say:

    What?

    • Re:Et tu, ZDNet? (Score:2, Informative)

      by whee ( 36911 )
      Note the date of the article: January 11, 2001 2:41 PM PT

    • Re:Et tu, ZDNet? (Score:2, Insightful)

      by edwarddes ( 199284 )
      the fastest processors on terms of clock speed may be the p4 and its multigigahertz, but think of all the other processor lines that are MUCH faster at lower clock speeds computationaly wise(powerpc-power4, alpha, itanium...)

  • Another Moore's Law misquote? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Jimmy_B ( 129296 ) <jim@jimrEEEandomh.org minus threevowels> on Sunday January 13, 2002 @01:37PM (#2832906) Homepage
    I noticed that in the article, the author mentions Moore's Law as stating that transistor densities double every 18-24 months. Wasn't it originally 12 months, then changed to every 12-18 months?
    • Nope. [intel.com]
      It is often misquoted as saying something about double speed in 18 months. The CPU-speed is actually somewhat closer to 12 months nowadays (or, so I've read from at least two independent researchers). What's holding the computers back is bus-speed, which doubles approx. every 3 years.
      • Having said that, VME and VMX technology is so far ahead of the pathetic PCI busses available, that all anyone should really need is a good bus transplant.


        (VMX, if I remember correctly, is 128-bit bus technology, which has been around for the past decade or so. Why PCs don't use it, is beyond me, as it's tried & tested, there are already cards for it - unlike the failed PS/2 - and it offers far more capacity for growth than any other technology they're shoving into PCs, DESPITE being older than the busses that PCs are using.)

        • Actually, with 64bit 133Mhz PCI-X, the peripheral busses "should be fine for a while". 32/33 PCI is just so cheap, and relatively easy to do (especially when you have drop-in logic), that cost-effectiveness for PCs is too large a factor. How else are you going to get the cost/volume numbers so attractive for network/SCSI cards... 10/100 Ethernet cards have been available for as low as $5-15 for a couple years now - hard to compete with that, and still make a profit.

          For servers, you can have a bridge chip that has 6-8 point-point PCI-X busses - some 64 bit, some 32 bit, and since they aren't truly shared, each card can attain it's full speed (PCI/PCI-X 33/66/133). Cost isn't nearly the issue that it is in consumer desktops.

          That all being said - a bigger issue becomes the CPUMemory bandwidth... this is somewhat alleviated with the 266Mhz (133DDR) updates, but there is still a lot left to do... Of course, an 8MB on-chip L3 cache wouldn't hurt either :)
      • And ironically you misquoted as well, Moore said that transistor density would double every 18 months, not chip speed (which is closely related).
    • No. It is, in fact, every 18-24 months, and always has been.
  • At least there will always be a secondary use [slashdot.org] for silicone.
  • This article in the the story is nearly a year old...

    Tomorrow /. will be reporting the details the florida recount ?

  • MHZ Blah! (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Comparing Megahertz on processors is like comparing Civics to Corvettes. "My Corvette can do 6000 RPM!" "Oh yeah, my Honda can do 8000 RPM!"

    Its just no longer a useful way of measuring.
    Just as a 1.x Ghz P-III and a 1.x Ghz P-IV are not the same.
  • I wonder if CmdrTaco is dating his checks 2001. Thought that article looked familiar, read it a year ago.
  • Moore's law says we should have 10ghz processors in 2005, and lo and behold, someone develops a technology so we will.

    now - 2ghz
    June 2003 - 4ghz
    January 2005 - 8ghz
    Spring 2005 - 10ghz

    • excuse my ignorance but would the last row be

      August 2006 - 10ghz

      maybe i missed the joke.. awell,
      • It would be, except that 10 != 8*2. August 2006 would be 16ghz. Someone better at math with me can correct me, but 10ghz ought to be a few months after 8ghz (maybe early summer 2005).
    • Actualy moore's law is about the comutational power and the amount of transistors on a chip. Not the amount of Hz's a chip processes instructions at

      Theoreticly, a chip with twice the amount of transistors but running at the same clock speed, would be twice as powerfull as the model with half the transistors.

      the P4 is a nice example of this, higher Hz's, but lower amount of instructions per tick ;-)
      • Theoreticly, a chip with twice the amount of transistors but running at the same clock speed, would be twice as powerfull as the model with half the transistors.

        Why do you think this? The "power" of digital circuits is almost entirely determined by the feature size, given adequate integration. Doubling the transistors on a 0.5 micron process is not the same as using a 0.25 micron process. If you're thinking "put two processors on the 0.5 micron chip", you're mistaken, because it is well known how difficult multiprocessor systems are, one processor with twice the power is much easier to use.

        Besides, most transistors in processors today are used in cache. Doubling the cache most certainly does not double performance (see any computer architecture text)

      • Actualy moore's law is about the comutational power and the amount of transistors on a chip. Not the amount of Hz's a chip processes instructions at

        Good point.

        It gets me thining, though.

        If one did plot the operating frequency vs year on a semilogarithmic scale, would any similar trend be observed?

        Likewise, if one plotted the width of the memory addressing of these chips (8-bit, 16-bit, 32-bit, 64-bit) vs time, would a trend be observed?

        [Drifting abruptly on topic] Is X ray lithography pretty much too expensive and impractical, then?

    • Cutting and pasting my own comments...

      It truely is amazing how many people quote what they think is Moores Law only to be radically off.

      It has to do with TRANSISTOR DENSITY doubling every 18months. Nothing at all to do with performance, other than as a side effect -- and thats usually a side effect. Sometimes there is no performance boost at all if the transisters are used for compatibility or configurability. Like say Microcode modifications and X86 compatibility layers.

      "The observation made in 1965 by Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel, that the number of transistors per square inch on integrated circuits had doubled every year since the integrated circuit was invented. Moore predicted that this trend would continue for the foreseeable future. In subsequent years, the pace slowed down a bit, but data density has doubled approximately every 18 months, and this is the current definition of Moore's Law, which Moore himself has blessed. Most experts, including Moore himself, expect Moore's Law to hold for at least another two decades."

      http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/M/Moores_Law.html
      • I'm aware of what Moore's law really is, but it does seem to work with processor clock speeds too (for example, 36 months ago, 500mhz was top of the line). If you must be anal, my name is Moore too, so I'll say it's my law the processor clock speeds double every 18 months. That better?
  • i'm wondering what will happen with 10 Ghz processor because every cycle, lights can only travel about 3 cm...?
    • Basically, the speed of propogation will become a key factor in design. Registers between pipeline stages won't be *necessary* as the speed keeps increasing as the VLSI people can count on the speed of propogation (ie use the signal propogation in the chip as the register).

    • Re:10 Ghz and speed of light... (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Waffle Iron ( 339739 ) on Sunday January 13, 2002 @03:01PM (#2833209)
      i'm wondering what will happen with 10 Ghz processor because every cycle, lights can only travel about 3 cm...?

      The problem is actually worse than you indicate. Electrical signals on a chip propagate much slower than the speed of light due to the impedance properties of the signal traces.

      This problem explains some of the "features" of the P4 that people complain about. The architecture reserves entire pipeline stages for "signal drive"; these stages are just to let signals propagate accross the chip. IIRC, the drive stages are wasted on today's P4's, but once the clock speed reaches higher GHz, they will be very necessary.

      Concepts such as "hyperthreading" may become more popular as well. This allows multiple alternate CPU states sharing the same silicon. If they alternate every CPU clock, for example, one hyperthread can be calculating while the other one is propagating its last clock's results across the chip.

  • Read the article? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Christopher Thomas ( 11717 ) on Sunday January 13, 2002 @01:51PM (#2832954)
    Extreme Ultraviolet LLC has built the first ultraviolet lithography stand for manufacturing processors.

    Um, we've been using UV for a while now. This company has built the first _Extreme_ UV rig. This is especially obvious as a press release when you realize that they can define EUV as beginning more or less wherever they feel like. The term "EUV" was coined when "X-Rays" got a bad name in lithography circles (it used to be "deep UV", "Soft X-Rays", "Hard X-Rays").

    Will this make silicone obsolete?

    a) "Silicon".

    b) No.

    The article says:

    "EUV technology is very extendable...and we have demonstrated that it would work down to the 30-nanometer level," Gwyn said.

    Barring a new invention, which is always possible, "It should take us to the end of silicon...as we know it today," he said.

    In english: The limits of silicon technology will run out before the limits of EUV technology.

    They're not ending silicon - they're saying that as long as silicon will be around, photolithography will be around.
  • Fish. Barrel. Hand Grenade.

    This is too damn easy.

  • e-beam technology is more interressting than euv (Score:5, Interesting)

    by tempmpi ( 233132 ) on Sunday January 13, 2002 @01:55PM (#2832973)
    While EUV technology is very likely to dominate the mass markets like x86s CPU, northbridges, etc. E-beam technology could bring much more competition to the market. As the article and serveral other source told us, e-beam tech. "draws" the transitors one by one to the silicone. This drawing process is much slower than the normal mask-based lithography. But you do not need a mask, you can make changes to the chip layout much faster because you don't need to make new masks and must just change the programming of your e-beam chip printer.

    This could enable cost-effective low-volume chip series made with a cutting edge manufacturing process. It could also make expensive and "slow" fpga based chip emulators obsolete. It could also be the break-through for open hardware because open chip design could be manufatured without big finacial problems.
    • While e-beam technology is, as stated, extremely flexible and useful as a 'one-off' prototyping method, it is also SLOW AS HECK. With millions of transistors, drawing one by one is not a solution for mass-production. With a wafer holding perhaps thousands of dies, I have heard from those in the industry that it can take up to 10 hours (hours!) for one wafer to be 'drawn'.

      This Will Not Do.
      • I always liked direct-writing E-beam approaches. They were used as far back as the 1970s. But they've always been very slow. There's been talk of systems with lots of electron guns, writing with multiple beams, but nothing has happened yet.

        And remember, you have to make a pass through the E-beam machine for each layer.

      • With millions of transistors, drawing one by one is not a solution for mass-production.


        Hmm... what we need then is an e-beam with some sort of prism-like splitter in front of it... sort of like when you you glue ten pens together to write 10 lines of text at once. If you could split a single e-beam into 1,000 parallel e-beams, separated by the right distances, you could then write 1,000 chips in parallel while still avoiding the need to draw up a mask.

      • While e-beam technology is, as stated, extremely flexible and useful as a 'one-off' prototyping method, it is also SLOW AS HECK. With millions of transistors, drawing one by one is not a solution for mass-production.

        I don't know that I'd want to use e-beam for prototyping. Your electrical performance might be so different that you could get fooled into thinking you have something which works. Prototyping isn't only for functional verification, it's also needed to see if you're meeting setup/hold times, jitter specs, etc, and that stuff is process sensitive.

        A better use for e-beaming is fixing/moding of prototype parts when a bug is found. Mask sets are so expensive now a days, if you suspect you've found the cause of a problem (and its small), you're better off trying to fix a few parts first.

        With a wafer holding perhaps thousands of dies, I have heard from those in the industry that it can take up to 10 hours (hours!) for one wafer to be 'drawn'.

        I think you mean 1 step in the wafer building process. In 0.13um you currenly get anywhere from 1-3 steps per day, and there are roughly 200 steps to making a wafer. That works out to about 3 month to make one batch of wafers.

  • This is getting silly... (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    All this processor power and still using mechanical hard drives!!!!, IDE and that...

    Why don't they concentrate on solid state hard drives, or better yet, a fibre optic bus... and bring the price down for them first, that processor at 10 GHz will spend more time waiting for the hard drive than anything.

  • 10GHz = 3cm wave; 240nm 1MGHz! (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The 10GHz frequency they are planning now has a wave length of 3cm (1.2"); meanwhile the CPUs are growing in size (since the number of transistors grows faster than the path shrinks) and will soon outgrow the ¼ of the wavelength; then makers will have soon to either stop the freq increase, or slice the CPU (either internally or externally) in smaller parts.

    Just to avoid any confusion, I recall that the 240nm wavelength cited for Deep UV is a frequency of 1,250,000GHz, that is 125,000 times the 10GHz of the future CPUs. Of course the EUV are still higher than DUV in freq.
    • What? The frequency of the light is independent of the size of the die. The light is shining *down* on the die. I fail to see any relevance in your post...
    • Well the 10GHz is the speed of the processor they think they are able to produce with EUV. It has nothing to do with the wavelength used in the etching process. The 10GHz just means that there is a clock thingy inside the processor which says 'tick' 10*10^9 times per second. Although this _does_ create a problem, as you hinted at. As the speed of light in vacuum is constant, it means that the clock signal will only propagate a certain length before the next 'tick'. With a 10GHz clock, the signal will propagate a maximum of about 3cm before the next 'tick' (high school physics, remember; c=lf, where c=speed of wave propagation, l=wavelength, f=frequency). Of course in reality it will propagate even less than 3cm (which is the wavelength you get if c=speed of light in vacuum=3*10^8m/s), as the speed of light inside the chip is somewhat slower than in vacuum. This will mean that the parts of the chip that are further away from the clock will be somewhat out of sync with the parts that are close to the clock. This is something chip designers certainly have to take into account. I'm not sure, maybe it is already an issue today?
  • I think what the submitter meant is that devices created with this new technology will so captivate nerds that it will completely displace any desire for women, thus making silicone obsolete.
  • The guy writing the ZD-net article seems to be making the assumption that the only (or primary at least) factor affecting the performance (or even the physical speed) of a CPU is the manufacturing process. Doesn't he seem to be forgeting the architecture issue? I mean, intel is currently ahead in the physical speed dept, not because of the manufacturing process, but because of architecture.
  • Quote: "Barring a new invention, which is always possible, "It should take us to the end of silicon...as we know it today," he [Chuck Gwyn, program director for EUV at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, Calif.] said."

    The limit for Silicon is hit when the paths "lithogrified" onto the wafers are less than a certain width, by this time measured in number of atoms. The distance between silicon atoms in a wafer is (again AFAIK) 0.235 nm [webelements.com], so today's 0.13-micron processes (130 nm) mean average path widths of ~550 atoms ... and I assume it will take a couple of dozen, at least, to make sure the yield doesn't drop through the floor.
    So - this is not about anything other than silicon, just the limits of this particular semiconductor.

    What else is there? Gallium Arsenide [wafertech.co.uk], AFAIK. But that's another story.

  • PCs have stopped being sexy. (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Has anyone else noticed, but suddenly PCs have stopped being sexy?

    I'm a power user. I make computer music and videos. 10GHz would be cool...

    But still, I yawned when I read this feature.

    Fact is, we don't need more GHz.

    What we need is more bandwidth (way more bandwidth) and some really innovative interesting software. (I.e. not that cack the Redmond guys have been producing for the last decade.)

    We need smart apps, better interfaces and reliability. (The effective GHz count gets cut to shreds every time there's a crash or data loss.)

    We need imagination, creative flair and colour...

    We don't need Windows, which still thinks it's living in the 80s. And we don't need Linux, which is the kind of long-haired, sandal-wearing geek-fest that gave the 70s a bad name.

    (Open Source? Yeah, so what if only terminal nerds care enough to use it? Like I want to know horizontal and vertical scan rates before I can get Xfree to run. Right...)

    Bottom line - who cares about 10GHz when most software has been designed by social inadequates who get excited by things that most people think are just plain sad?

    We need software that makes life easier, not harder and more aggravating.

    When we have that, 10GHz may start to matter again.

  • Neat... Intel 10ghz vs. AMD 10000XP(2.2ghz) (Score:3, Funny)

    by beamz ( 75318 ) on Sunday January 13, 2002 @02:26PM (#2833080)
    Great... so can we expect Intel to keep extending the pipeline in the processor so they can up the clock rate? Or are they going to actually going to improve the processor for something other than Quake?

    Nowadays all I associate clockrate with is Intel's marketing machine. AMD has slowly increased the clock rate and kept the price/performance gap decent AFAIK.

    At any rate, sounds like good engineering innovation.
  • "We expect to have the first full field-scanned images by April 1,"

    Q. Why haven't marketing people realized that using April 1 as a target date, for anything, just isn't a good idea?

    Really, did we learn nothing during the 20th century? How about March 31 instead?
    • If you look more carefully, they meant April 1, 2001. Not that this makes the date selection any more shrewd, but it does help to show the irrelevance of this particular article.

  • For the record, it's silicon, not silicone. Silicon is a semiconductor; Silicone used to caulk window frames and for certain 'implants'.

    The question is begged... how would a new lithography process which will enable silicon to continue to be used for another decade, make silicon obsolete? I really don't see how the original poster could have misunderstood this so grossly.

  • Silicon will become obsolete when the size of the gates inside the chip equals the wavelength of a
    electron. At this point the transistors cease to trasmit.

    There are already several replacements for silicon - copper compounds,
    magnetic alloys, fullerenes etc. - in order to keep up with Moore's law.
    But for many engineers throwing out silicon is difficult to imagine.
    For a number of years now almost all R&D in the semiconductor industry
    has been focussed on silicon-based chips. Throwing out silicon would
    mean letting of f a huge base of information acquired over 1/2 a century.
  • Chipmakers on fast track to 10GHz

    By John G. Spooner
    ZDNet News

    January 11, 2001 2:41 PM PT

    The semiconductor industry has reached an important milestone on the path to producing 10GHz chips ... ...

    Trolls: 1
    slashdot: 0

  • Bad article, no donut. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Animats ( 122034 ) on Sunday January 13, 2002 @03:13PM (#2833268) Homepage
    First, this article is from early 2001. It's a year old.

    There are two big unsolved problems with "extreme ultraviolet" lithography, which is really X-ray lithography. First, you need a coherent X-ray source. The proposed options are a synchrotron, which is big (house-sized) and expensive, or an X-ray laser, which nobody has yet made work. Sandia has claimed a laser-pumped "plasma" source, but it doesn't yet have enough power to do the job.

    The other problem is that the masks have to be almost perfect down to the atomic level. Surprisingly, there are ways to do this. It looks like that problem will be solved.

    However, the whole technology is nowhere near working. The major web pages [llnl.gov] on the subject haven't been updated for a year or so, which is a bad sign. Much of the work is being done at the old A-bomb labs (LLNL and Sandia), which today are sort of senior activity centers for old physicists. All the articles seem to come from there. We're not seeing much in the way of EUV articles from semiconductor-fab equipment manufacturers yet.

    There's considerable speculation in the industry that there might be a hiatus of a few years around 2004-2006, during which there won't be much progress in line width. This happened once before in the semiconductor industry, in the 1970s. But it's not the end; EUV should eventually work.

    Sometime around 2014 or so, we reach the End of Silicon, or at least the end of improvements to lithography on flat silicon, because atoms are too big. Further progress will require a new technology.

    • Coherent EUV sources. (Score:4, Informative)

      by Christopher Thomas ( 11717 ) on Sunday January 13, 2002 @09:41PM (#2834593)
      There are two big unsolved problems with "extreme ultraviolet" lithography, which is really X-ray lithography. First, you need a coherent X-ray source. The proposed options are a synchrotron, which is big (house-sized) and expensive, or an X-ray laser, which nobody has yet made work. Sandia has claimed a laser-pumped "plasma" source, but it doesn't yet have enough power to do the job.

      Or, you can use a frequency-doubled UV laser (frequency-doubled Ar:F lasers are the current favourite, if memory serves).

      Shining a laser beam through certain types of material produces an output beam that contains frequencies that are harmonics of the input beam's frequency, due to nonlinear interactions between the incident beam and the electrons in the material.

      This has been used as a tool in the lab for years, and has been under intense investigation for lithography for quite a while now. My understanding is that frequency-doubled EUV sources are already shipping.
    • I'm hoping someone figures out how to make an x-ray laser. The trouble would seem to be bouncing them so that your productive media would be pumped in sync. How do you line up things to x-ray flatness? What kind of media do you use full of k-shells? Ehhh, it's not my department.

      In the mean time, the folks at places like CAMD [lsu.edu] have had coherent xrays for a while. There are supposed to be about five other labs like this around. I supose you could try to miniturize this technology. If someone comes up with something better, great, but the techniques that can take advantage of it ARE being worked out today.

    • Sometime around 2014 or so, we reach the End of Silicon, or at least the end of improvements to lithography on flat silicon, because atoms are too big.

      Right. We just need to switch to smaller atoms. The radius of a silicon atom is about 1.17 Angstroms. However, a hydrogen atom is less than half the radius, at 0.53 Angstroms. Since component density is a function of area, substituting Hydrogen atoms for Silicon atoms would yeild 4.87 times the component density.

      Creating a hydrogen wafer and etching transistors into it are left as exercises for the reader.

      -
  • The news world needs to wake up and realize what a load of BS these articles are. Some posts mentioned the need for more bandwidth and I totally agree, but having done some simple tests with PC hardware, it is sufficient for entry level.

    Out of curiousity, I compared mpeg play back on both windows2K and BeOS on a dual P3 450 system with 32mb video and 512mb of ram. BeOS was able to play back full screen without skipping. Win2K skipped probably a few frames every minute and was very noticeable. Now I wasn't being very scientific about the test obviously, I just wanted to see if the hardware was capable of full screen (1280 X 1024 res) play back. The answer from a viewing perspective is yes.

    Although the older P3 architecture running on 100mhz bus with a single CPU isn't good enough for professional quality video editing (non-linear editing), the newer systems would perform much better. In comparison, a lot of professionals use Mac and Final Cut Pro 3. Having a 10ghz CPU will do very little for non-linear video editing.

    The hardware needs better bus architecture and the OS needs to be designed for streaming large amounts of data rapidly, which windows NT kernel currently does not do well. Microsoft has tried to get their systems into film school for editing with poor results. Linux isn't any better in that respect, so the only viable solution (BeOS) for PC video editing is gone.

    As more consumers get comfortable with video and music editing, the OS will have to change to meet the demand. If microsoft and intel doesn't, some one else will. This whole mhz battle won't go on forever. At some point, it will cease being the primary factor for consumer PC's.

  • Chemistry 101 (Score:5, Funny)

    by the eric conspiracy ( 20178 ) on Sunday January 13, 2002 @03:49PM (#2833408)

    Silicon: Chemical Formula Si, Atomic Number 14 in period table of elements, 2nd most common element in Earth's crust behind oxygen. Semiconductor. If silicon were to become obsolete we would need a replacement for stuff like rocks and materials as well as glass and concrete.

    Silica: SiO2, as pure a white crystaline material abundant in nature. Fused quartz is pure amorphus silica.

    Silicate: chemical compound containing silicon, oxygen, and one or more metals, e.g., aluminum, barium, beryllium, calcium, iron, magnesium, manganese, potassium, sodium, or zirconium. Found in quartz minerals such as agate, amethyst, chalcedony, flint, jasper, onyx, and rock crystal, opal, sand, sandstone, clay, granite, and many other rocks; in skeletal parts of various protists and animals, such as certain sarcodines, diatoms, and sponges, and in the stems and other tissue of higher plants.

    Silicone: inorganic polymer in which atoms of silicon and oxygen alternate in a chain; various organic radicals, such as the methyl group, CH3, are bound to the silicon atoms. As linear polymers silicones form a large class of useful fluids and greases. When crosslinked they form a useful class of synthetic rubbers.
  • This article appears to be over a year old! January 11th, 2001 is its date...
  • Now that Silicon's gonna be obsolete, I think she'll have to go with UV breasts... I can see it now.
  • "Barring a new invention, which is always possible, 'It should take us to the end of silicon...as we know it today,' he said."
    I always thought that moletronics [darpa.mil] would eventually replace silicon for good. The technology is manufactured at much smaller levels than what is being talked about in the article.
  • One on the questions on my physics test last year was about UV litography (since a swedish company is developing parts for it). Any way it increases the amount of circuits on the same area with a factor of about 400.
  • "Also "Soon" means we won't see actual chips until oh, say 2005, so don't hold your breath or anything."

    Do you think that's air you're breathing?

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