Keeping up with Moore’s Law
NEW YORK:
If innovation has a heart, it is probably a semiconductor, beating to the pace of Moores Law. Under this principle, named for Gordon Moore, the co-founder of Intel, the chip industry in the last four decades has doubled the number of transistors it crams onto a chip about every 18 months.
That is a big reason that chips are now in our offices, homes, cars and toys - and often implanted in our pets and occasionally in our own bodies. Chips are almost ubiquitous, and where they are not, they probably will be soon.
But keeping the heart of innovation beating is becoming ever harder and more expensive. Making chips is an improbable blend of farming, photography and baking: Think of your standard 300-millimeter silicon wafer as a field where mostly metallic substances are “grown” according to patterns put in place by photolithography, and then “baked” at extremely high temperatures.
This agri-photo-baking requires big money: It costs $3 billion to $5 billion to build a single semiconductor fabrication plant, or “fab.” In the near future, that figure is likely to rise to $12 billion, according to VLSI Research. In the boom-and-bust cycle of the chip industry, it has become increasingly difficult to get a return on fab investments.
The remarkable progression of Moores Law, meanwhile, involves continually shrinking almost everything to do with the chips. Today, the transistors in a high-end chip are no wider than the nucleus of an individual cell - that is far smaller than the smallest light wave.
Until now, as chips became smaller, they also became faster in about the same proportion. It is still true for transistors, but it is no longer true for the wires that are used to connect transistors, which limit performance gains. Daniel Edelstein, a program manager and fellow at IBM Research, said, “Were running out of steam.”
Edelstein is leading a team of researchers from inside and outside IBM in developing a new way to solve the problem: using “self-assembling” nanotechnology to make better insulators, and raise performance. In this case, self-assembly involves creating so-called air gaps - vacuums a few nanometers wide that keep the billions of tiny copper wires in a chip from touching one another, instead of putting down a layer of insulating material and trying to align it effectively. It is more efficient, and it means that IBM will not need to spend $50 million on photolithographic equipment.
A few weeks ago, Edelstein took me on a tour of the fab in East Fishkill, New York, that will be the first to use the self-assembly technique. While the technique is not quite done being tested, John Kelly 3rd, IBMs senior vice president for research, said that “there is no question in our minds this is going to work,” and that IBM would move to it by 2009, first for an existing high-end processor or a next-generation chip, then for all its fabs.
With the self-assembling nanotechnology, he also had to go beyond IBMs walls, in part because IBM in the 1990s decided for a number of reasons - including costs and the desire to help create a Ph.D. feeder program - to work with a public-private consortium to develop a modern research fab run by the College of Nanoscience and Electronics at the State University of New York at Albany. This fab features one-of-a-kind equipment, and it is where Edelsteins team developed its techniques before moving it to IBMs fab in East Fishkill.
Kelly said IBM was developing other ways to use self-assembly in other parts of the chip-making process.
Other companies are also racing to adopt the techniques. Steve Jurvetson, a co-founder of the venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson, said self-assembling technology held huge promise for all types of semiconductors. He said two start-ups that his firm had backed, ZettaCore, which is developing memory chips, and Konarka Technologies, which makes solar-power technology, were close to reaching commercial production of their products, thanks in part to nanoscale self-assembly.
Richard Doherty, director of the engineering consultant group Envisioneering, said self-assembly techniques should also greatly reduce the number of defective chips, leading to better returns for fabs.
The techniques could lead to much more dramatic advances. Alain Kaloyeros, professor of nanoelectronics at SUNY-Albany, said self-assembling nanotechnology would make it possible to etch a computer onto a pair of glasses, or to create “nanobots” that can float in our bloodstream, searching for cancerous cells that the bots will then eliminate.
