Brads Electronic Projects Forum

IBM and allies find a way to make chips even tinier and faster

"This is a welcome sign for the chip industry," said Envisioneering analyst Richard Doherty. "You can count on at least two more turns of Moore's Law benefits."

That's remarkable, given that it's something like detailed finger-painting with a boxing glove.

http://www.cnet.com/uk/news/ibm-and-all ... he-future/

Can anyone tell me what the two more turns of Moore's Law are?

I wonder if they will just stamp it with light because painting could cause a lot of mistakes in the chips at that size.

That is absolutely amazing, how they're able to make make die feature sizes less than one-fiftieth of a wavelength of visible light. Keeping Moore's Law going for two more rounds, ie, that the number of transistors on a die of a given size could double every two years, for four more years, also continues what had appeared to be ending. Wafers don't get "painted" though, as if with ink or toner. As I understand it, it's a photochemical process, more or less, kind of like contact printing in the dark room where we used to lay the film directly on the paper and flash it, then develop the paper in the chemicals. (There are more steps though, for more layers.)

I have to agree with you there Garth, it is simply amazing how small they are making these transistors now. Not only that, there are (from memory) thousands of individual processing steps to make up a wafer of chips, and every single processing step has to be so unbelievably precise down to the nanometer range. There are some great videos on youtube that take you through various chip factories which my students enjoy watching when we're learning about CPU's.