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How much smaller can chips go?

Posted on 13 Aug 2010 at 11:24

DUV should suffice for the 22nm chips that are set to enter manufacturing in 2011, but by the time the 16nm chips of 2013 enter production, an alternative will be required.

That alternative is called extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUV), which uses a series of precisely placed, multilayered mirrors to generate vastly improved resolutions. Intel and others have been working on it for a long time.

In 1997, Intel founder Gordon Moore and members of the Clinton administration announced a $250 million private-public partnership to develop EUV, with partners such as Motorola and AMD.

We’re running out of tricks in what we can do with optical lithography, and we have to move to some other technique

“For the past 40 years we’ve made these patterns optically,” Moore said at the time. “We’ve used optical systems of one sort or another to project the image of the pattern we want on to the wafer. The problem is you can’t make images much smaller than the wavelength of the light that you’re using to make the image... We’re running out of tricks in what we can do with optical lithography, and we have to move to some other technique, something using much shorter wavelengths...”

Thirteen years later, and Intel and others are still waiting for EUV to be able to manufacture tomorrow’s processors. Intel alone has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on developing EUV machines – “kind of an expensive camera”, is how Intel fellow Jose Maiz referred to them – and yet there’s still no guarantee they’ll be able to deliver the required accuracy.

“To manufacture this stuff, you have to have control at the sub-nanometre scale,” said Maiz. “The challenge isn’t just to make one [processor], but millions and millions of them, and for all of them to operate.”

ARM’s CTO agrees that EUV still has a long way to go before machines can be introduced into fabrication plants. “Our research group took out the first 22nm processors a while ago,” said Miller. “The fabs are being built now – more life will be wrung out [of the existing DUV technology] for the next few years.

“[EUV] isn’t a done deal. There will be surprises, no doubt about that.”

Ever decreasing circles

So how much further can they shrink the processor manufacturing process? Intel’s public roadmaps only stretch as far as 16nm in 2013, although it’s a safe bet that Intel – which delivers a new architecture every two years – has at least pencilled in 11nm by 2015.

ARM’s chief technology officer is more conservative, claiming that we’ll have reached 13nm by 2020. “Beyond that? That’s beyond Tomorrow’s World,” Miller said, when asked to venture an opinion on whether processors could ever reach the sub-nanometre level.

Even if such infinitesimally small manufacturing processes seem unimaginable, it’s exactly the sort of challenge the engineers thrive on. “You shouldn’t accept something is impossible just because you don’t know how to do it,” said Maiz. These guys literally don’t know when to stop.

Author: Barry Collins