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Hardware Technology

Scientists Pave Way For 25nm CPUs 82

Posted by kdawson from the still-a-ways-to-go dept.
arcticstoat writes in with word that scientists at the Space Nanotechnology Laboratory at MIT have found a new way of extending Moore's law into the future — they have succeeded in etching a grid of 25nm lines into a silicon wafer. The article notes that this technique could be used for writing the grid on which chips are laid down, but that the electronic elements would have to be written using more complex techniques. "[Researchers] created an interference pattern using light from a laser with a wavelength of 351 nm. The pattern consists of alternating light and dark zones repeating every 200 nm. This allowed them to etch 25-nm lines into a silicon wafer, each 175 nm apart. They then repeated the process three times, each time shifting the interference pattern by 50 nm and etching another 25-nm groove. The resulting grid has alternating 25-nm stripes and grooves..."
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Scientists Pave Way For 25nm CPUs More

Scientists Pave Way For 25nm CPUs

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  • This is a bad headline title. (Score:5, Informative)

    by RightSaidFred99 ( 874576 ) on Saturday July 12, 2008 @02:36PM (#24165549)
    25nm is nothing to write home about, companies are already planning for 25nm. What's exciting is that they created a feature that was smaller than the wavelength of the light used to etch it. Had they used 400nm light to create a 45nm feature, would the title have been "MIT breakthrough could lead to 45nm chips!!!"?

    • Re:This is a bad headline title. (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Falstius ( 963333 ) on Saturday July 12, 2008 @03:39PM (#24165953)

      Not only did they make features smaller than the wavelength, they did it with a relatively simple and inexpensive setup. It would be interesting to see this combined with the memristor development in an attempt to create very cheap, high density storage or even cooler, hybrid analog/digital computers.

      • But don't inference patterns only create stripes? I don't see how you could create something as intricate as the placing of each transistor using inference patterns.

    • Somebody better get on that if we're getting to 5nm feature size.

    • Re:This is a bad headline title. (Score:4, Informative)

      by damouloud ( 317642 ) on Saturday July 12, 2008 @04:00PM (#24166069)

      Well, the fact that they've been creating features smaller than the wavelength of the illuminating light is nothing to write home about either.

      Current chips (since at least the 180nm node) are being fabbed this way at all microelectronics fabs all around the world. We already use 193nm light to create features as small as 22nm (using tricks like immersion, double-exposure and OPC)

      • Graphene (Score:1, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward

        This will help us to get into the resolutions which will make graphene come alive for us. After all, its semiconductive properties only begin to happen at scales of 10nm or lower. I'm eagerly awaiting the graphene age to commence.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Bombula ( 670389 )
      I thought quantum interference was a problem with circuits and gates smaller than 40nm, so even the ability to etch the channels won't mean they'll work. Maybe I'm remembering incorrectly - can someone set the record straight?
    • They've been making features smaller than the wavelength of light for almost a decade now using interference lithography, it's nothing new, but it did scare people that Moore's Law would be over sooner than they thought (after all, how would they write features using extreme UV with the materials that have?).

      What's interesting is that their interference lithography mask allows them to reach a minimum feature size limit of 25nm for silicon.

      Hurray, Moore's Law should continue for another 10 or so year

  • ASML has roadmap upto 16 nm chips, (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward

    ASML already has working tools for 32 nm litho. 16 nm is planned in next couple of years.
    http://www.asml.com

  • Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Saturday July 12, 2008 @03:05PM (#24165767)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re: (Score:1, Interesting)

      by zappepcs ( 820751 )

      IANA nanotechnology specialist, but IMO the 'next big thing' might be something like an i686 on the same die as a Xilinx whopping-big FPGA so that you can do hardware encryption at memory bus speeds or things like that. When the hardware gets smaller you can be more creative about how you combine it with other hardware.

      Personally, I'm looking forward to the ARM-23 running ARMLinux on a PDA with realtime encryption and DSL sized wireless bandwidth. When you can jam a bunch of hardware in a tiny place, things

    • This is a direct consequence of your misunderstanding of Moore's Law, journalism or not. Moore's Law does not insist on miniaturisation, but rather on the degree of integration (DoI). Until the relatively recent time, the minuaturisation was the main factor in increasing the DOI. It is no longer. And that is not a problem. The current trend is the increase of the DoI derived from the increase of the absolute size of the chip. This is a well-established trend already, just look at the multi-core CPUs. So, in

    • Re: (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Both Xilinx and Altera are fabless so their time to market depends on their ability to execute given the process parameters or cell libraries supplied by the foundry of their choice.

    • Oh great... (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Chordonblue ( 585047 )

      All this so we can fit another 10 or 20 cores that programmers won't use... Or was that too bitter?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Skapare ( 16644 )

        Eventually they will figure out to just put RAM there in place of the extra cores.

        • Hmm... Wonder how much performance gain there would be with 2GB of RAM with L2 cache performance. =)

          That would lead to a similar situation as with the Chip-RAM/Fast-RAM architecture used in the old Amiga architecture, where there's one area of RAM that the CPU has blazing fast access to and one where the CPU has as slow access as the other devices.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Chemisor ( 97276 )

      > What is next after silicon transistors on a die?

      Next, you optimize your bloaty software. Word Perfect 5.1 ran just fine on an 8MHz 286, and had a capaibility set not too different from the current word processors. Any piece of software can be optimized to the point when most operations are instantaneous

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by jfim ( 1167051 )

        Next, you optimize your bloaty software. Word Perfect 5.1 ran just fine on an 8MHz 286, and had a capaibility set not too different from the current word processors.

        And it still runs fine. Software doesn't rot(although media does) so you can still use it if you want to, especially considering the x86 architecture is quite backwards compatible.

        Obviously, if the average computer gets faster and has more memory, programs will trade some optimization in order to have better code maintainability, more features, etc.

        Any piece of software can be optimized to the point when most operations are instantaneous

        I think this is very dependent on the type of software. I'm sure some people in the movie industry would love if 3D rendering would become instantaneous.

  • Been there done that (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 12, 2008 @03:09PM (#24165789)

    I've laid floating lines 1 nm apart with my boat in the past. 25 nm could be done if you wanted but that's getting pretty far apart. Who wants this grid, and why the heck would you use a laser to create light and dark zones every 200 nautical miles?

  • Shrinking in size is one part of the problem (Score:4, Informative)

    by feranick ( 858651 ) on Saturday July 12, 2008 @03:14PM (#24165829)
    The process of making smaller features is only a small fraction of the problem in producing 25nm (or smaller) Si-based electronics. Left aside quantum effects, which start to dominate at length scales smaller than 10nm, stability and electrical leakage through the gate are the most significant problems. When Intel went from 65nm to 45 nm, it wasn't just a "shrinking" process, but an all new use of materials design had to be used to deal with the gate current leakage. In simple words, the silicon oxide insulator was just too thin not to leak. The new metal high-K (Hafnium-based) is the major step that allowed those chip to be made. This research is good, but it solves only a small fraction of the difficulties the electronics industry faces in dealing with Moore's law.

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by LanceUppercut ( 766964 )

      Exactly. And it is not only limited to the physical effects themselves, but also includes the limited capabilities of the modern design and verification software necessary to simulate these effects on any input of any pratical size in any practical time.

      Designing these chips will be expensive. And that's exactly what Moore's Law is about. Not some stupid miniaturisation of the devices.

  • linewidth != wavelength (Score:4, Informative)

    by tsjaikdus ( 940791 ) on Saturday July 12, 2008 @03:25PM (#24165873)
    You can create much smaller lines than the wavelength of your light. You use tricks for that, but that's how it is done at Samsung, IBM, Intel, etc. for ages.

  • Moore's Law (Score:3, Funny)

    by Yvan256 ( 722131 ) on Saturday July 12, 2008 @03:28PM (#24165895) Homepage Journal

    Everyone keeps mentioning Moore's Law and all the problems that go with it. Why isn't there anyone to stand up to him so that we're finally free of his damn limiting laws?

    Oh wait, that kind of law. My bad.

  • Moore's Law is not restricted to silicon (Score:3, Insightful)

    by mschuyler ( 197441 ) on Saturday July 12, 2008 @03:41PM (#24165963) Homepage Journal

    Though Gordon Moore certainly developed his law around the silicon chip, the interesting thing about his law is that it is retroactive and not restricted to silicon, leading to the possibility that even if there is a real limit to silicon, something else will come along to replace it and keep the law going through another iteration. Whether that turns out to be holographic, 3-D, biological, or whatever is anyone's guess at this point.

    If you start out with the Hollerith census counting machines developed for the 1890 census (the ones that used cards the size of dollar bills because they had a bunch of dollar bill boxes, hench the size of the punched card and the 80-column screen), then move to electric relay switches, then to vacuum tubes, then to transistors, then to silicon, the whole thing is an exponential curve with a doubling every 18-24 months.

    Every time I hear someone saying, "We're eaching the end of Moore's Law," I think: Not.

  • Moore's Law is not in any way tied to miniaturisation of chip features, as the clueless ones seem to believe.

  • This doesn't impress me at all (Score:5, Informative)

    by Cutie Pi ( 588366 ) on Saturday July 12, 2008 @04:15PM (#24166157)

    First, IAALE (I am a lithography engineer) working on Intel's 22nm process technology. Let's clear up a few misconceptions:

    1) The name of a logic node is directly related to the size of the features being made. Those names (e.g. 65nm, 45m, 32nm, etc.) used to relate to the "half-pitch" of the minimum pitch that was printed. But that is not true today. 65nm used a minimum pitch of ~200nm, 45nm used ~140nm and 32nm is using ~100nm. The next node, 22nm is slated to use minimum a pitch of 72nm. The features discussed in this article have a pitch of 50nm, which would be equivalent to the node after 22nm, i.e. 16nm.

    2) It's not hard to print features smaller than the wavelength of light. For the lens based systems we used, the Rayleigh criterion gives the minimum pitch possible: 0.25*lambda/NA, where lambda=wavelength (193nm) and NA=numerical aperature (1.35 for the best lenses). So 72nm is the minimum pitch, already much smaller than the wavelength

    3) I hate to break it to these researchers, but interferometry has been used for a looong time to make gratings. Search for "interferomety lithography" on Google Scholar. The fourth link is called "Nanolithography using extreme ultraviolet lithography interferometry: 19 nm lines and spaces". That paper is from 1999. And they did that one exposure, not three (using a smaller wavelength).
    You would actually need at least one more exposure to divide the grating into something that resembled a logic circuit. The technique in this artcle is not practcal for a number of reasons, but we can do better than them using pitch-doubling techniques and only two exposures.

  • A size perspective (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Skapare ( 16644 ) on Saturday July 12, 2008 @06:24PM (#24167173) Homepage

    Here is a perspective on the size of these 25nm stripes and grooves. If a cross-hatch of these stripes and grooves done both vertically and horizontally each had a pixel of a picture placed on it, then the number of high definition 1920x1080 pictures you could fit in just one square millimeter would be 20.833 pictures wide by 37.037 pictures high, for an average of 771.605 pictures per square millimeter ... a half minute of video at 25 fps. For the metric challenged, that's 529.166 pictures wide by 940.741 pictures high, for an average of 497808.642 pictures per square inch ... over 4.6 hours of video at 30 fps.

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