Nanotechnology Gets Finer

An anonymous reader writes "ZDNet reports on a new level of detail found in nanotech construction." From the article: "Japan's NEC Electronics has developed a technology to make advanced microchips with circuitry width of 55 nanometers, or billionths of a meter, the Nihon Keizai Shimbun business daily reported Sunday. Finer circuitry decreases the size of a chip and cuts per-unit production costs. It also helps chips process data faster."

how small is a nanometer?

circuitry width of 55 nanometers, or billionths of a meter,

55 of them to be exact.

Brotught to you by the Department of Redundancy Department.

Is there a limit?

I don't see why there needs to be.... but i'm no math genius.

Re:Is there a limit?

The hard limit is around 0.2 nanometers (the size of one atom in
a crystal structure - very roughly of course). The real limit is
that it gets more and more expensive to get closer and closer to
the hard limit, so don't expect anything below 10 nm any time
soon.

Oh, did I mention that you gain less and less from going smaller
because more signal is wasted as heat. Also, solid state physics
really changes around 30 nm (e.g. the concept of carrier mobility
loses meaning - you have to treat each impurity self consistently).
In short, going below even 30 nm is major money (compared with
the currently developed 35-50 nm processes, which are themself a lot
of money to put in production).

Re:Is there a limit?

Is there a limit?

There actually is and it has nothing to do with math but physics. Obviously there is a limit when you start talking circuits that are made of single paths of atoms. Even before that there's a leakage that occurs leading to errors. There'd have to be a redundancy to overcome the occational lost electron so you get a deminishing return. There's talk of ways of avoiding the the issue but circuits a few atoms across are likely to be the limit. Anything beyond that will mean working on a sub atomic level and well beyond any known technology.

Re:Is there a limit?

I don't see why there needs to be.... but i'm no math genius.

The hard lower limit is based on the sizes of the atoms involved, but you can't really get very close to a single atom thick without radically changing designs. For example, one of the thinner parts in a typical CMOS circuit is the gate oxide layer. In typical semiconductors, this is composed of silicon dioxide. The problem is that if that is made only a single atom thick, at a given spot you don't really have silicon dioxide anymore; you only have silicon or oxygen. With current designs, you need to maintain a layer that's thick enough to still be silicon dioxide -- i.e. molecule-sized, not atom-sized.

Realistically, even getting close to that is pretty difficult anyway. Even at the present time, the gate oxide layers are starting to cause problems -- the gate oxide layer is supposed to act as an insulator, so no direct current flows through it. In reality, a little direct current will inevitably "leak" through, but in the past it's been pretty small. In current designs, the gate oxide layer is getting thin enough that this leakage current is becoming a substantial part of the total power drawn by the part.

There are ways around that, such as using a different material. When you thin the oxide layer, the conductors connected to each side of it can be smaller, and still maintain the same capacitance. Another way to achieve the same objective is to use a material with a higher dielectric constant (traditionally abbreviated as "K").

Silicon dioxide is also used to insulate between other conductors on the chip as well. Here, you generally want to reduce the capacitance between the conductors though, because increased capacitance leads to increased cross-talk (the signal on one conductor creating noise in a conductor nearby).

Therefore, semiconductor materials people are working in both directions: low-K dielectrics for insulation, that maintain the same (or lower) capacitance between conductors with thinner insulation, as well as high-K dielectrics to allow thicker gate-oxide layers (reducing leakage) while maintaining the increased capacitance of a thinner layer. These, however, typically lead to substantially more difficult (read: costly) manufacturing. Of cousre, there are a lot of other possibilities as well, and each has its own strengths and weaknesses. For example, some designs use strained silicon -- actually "straining" the lattice of silicon molecules in the crystal formation so they're either closer together or further apart. Other designs change the basic wafer construction -- a traditional wafer is simply a layer of silicon. SOI is Silicon On Insulator -- a later of insulation, with a thin layer of silicon over the type. Again, creating the wafer this way costs some extra, but more importantly (at least to the designer) a transistor built this way has something of a memory effect -- the way it acts at any given time depends not only on the voltage applied right now, but also on its previous state. While this may be usable for embedded memory [innovativesilicon.com] it can be a real PITA for everything else.

Anyway, I suspect the real limit will be mostly economic: a current fabrication facility costs a LOT of money -- around 1 1/2 billion US dollars (non-US residents feel free to assume I really meant 1 milliard Euro).

This expense has already lead to a couple of things: even large companies often can't afford to build a fab on their own anymore, so they often have to form/join some sort of consortium to build a modern fab. Another business model simply separates the companies into two halves: fabless design houses, and then a few companies that just fabricate designs for various others. For an obvious example, neither nVidia nor ATI does their own fabrication -- they design chips that are then built (along with a lot of other people's) by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation (TSMC). Of course, TSMC ha

Don't we already have 35nm processes?

Um? Haven't we had 65nm and 35nm processors for a while? Is this just another Slashvertisement?

Re:Don't we already have 35nm processes?

Intel has been building a 65nm fab and retooling existing fabs for 65nm. 35nm is planned but hasn't actually been done yet. It's unlikely to help much either, because current leakage at those levels is being insane. If you save 40% power by switching to a smaller manufacturing process and lose 35% back to leakage, that leaves you 5% better. With the costs involved in switching process sizes, you would have been better off not switching in the first place. Even past 90nm is getting pretty shaky in terms of leakage. Intel and AMD are both definitely goign to 65nm, but I don't know if there's much of a future for chips beyond that unless somebody comes up with some real ingenious tweak to the crystal structures.

Re:Don't we already have 35nm processes?

35nm is planned but hasn't actually been done yet. It's unlikely to help much either, because current leakage at those levels is being insane.

Although we might not gain anything by going below 30-35nm gates, don't overlook the huge fallout rate of current photolithography (if you can still call it "photo" when dealing with "soft" x-rays as the light source).

If you can produce, at your extreme limit, a 65nm feature, then trying to produce exactly 65nm features leaves almost no room for error. If, however, you can produce down to 5nm features, then you can manage 35nm features with a huge margin of error.

Thus, your fallout rate drops from the current of over 50% (or so I've heard - I don't know the exact figure), to very nearly zero.


The practicality of clock speed increases and heat/energy reduction aside, better photolithography (or whatever manufacturing techniques we eventually move on to) means higher yields of better quality at the same size.

Also, consider the fact that some parts of a modern CPU run a LOT faster than other parts - Compare addition with division, for example. Addition has taken a single clock (less, actually, but assuming a serial dependancy, you can't do better than one op per clock) for several generations now, while division still brings the CPU to a crawl. If you could make a full adder "fast enough" at whatever size optimizes energy consumption (90nm seems pretty good at the moment; 65 might waste more than it saves), while chewing through power to perform a division in fewer clocks with 15nm gates - That would both improve performance and save power at the same time.

Nanotechnology?

We've had sub-micron CMOS processes for years now. Many of us are using computers with 90nm chips in them. But I've never heard of it called nanotech before. Maybe it's not inaccurate, but in my mind that term is more descriptive of other materials employing nanoscale materials that never did before (clothing comes to mind).

Re:Nanotechnology?

The term has, over the last years, become something of a catch-all phrase for all things below 100 nm, also including fairly ordinary chemistry, unfortunately. Originally, the term was invented by Norio Taniguchi, but broadly popularized by Eric Drexler with the famous book "Engines of Creation" (available for free as in beer at http://www.foresight.org/EOC/index.html [foresight.org]). "Engines" was over the top in some respects and often criticized, but even ardent opponents of Drexler's vision of nanotech like the recently deceased Richard Smalley admit they have been brought into nanotechnology by this very book. Back in the days of "Engines", nanotechnology was strictly confined to the not yet developed "mass-manufacturing of devices to atomic precision and specification".

Note that Drexler himself has presumably ceded the term to its current usage and has called Intel's 90nm chips "nanotechnology", although it bears no resemblence whatsoever to Engines-style nanotech. He prefers "zetatech" (mega, tera, peta, exa, zeta) nowadays because of the quantity of atoms involved, but I think it's rarely used. Molecular Manufacturing is the preferred term for what used to be Nanotechnology. Let's see how many more rearguard action Nanotechnology has yet to fight before it becomes reality at last.

with decreased size...

... comes increased RF interference and possible heat concerns, with more electrons flowing through the same amount of area.

What we need is chips that work smarter, not harder.

Will "top down" beat "bottom up"?

Bottom up construction has been a central tenet in some parts of the nanotechnology community. The idea that putting things together by controlling the position of individual atoms/molecules during fabrication will allow enormous breakthroughs in computing and other fields. But at least in the silicon based semiconductor business, the top down approach keeps marching mercilessly toward the bottom. This while bottom up synthesis/fabrication is still stuck at proof of concept. Might "top down" make it to the bottom - before the "bottom up" makes it to the top?

Yet another press release

We already have 65 nanometer process chips in production. Even this article, after parroting the NEC press release mentions that Intel is building a 45 nm process plant, which is a step further along than "NEC has developed a technology" to make 55 nm chips.

Here is an article from two years ago [architosh.com] with an expected timetable for chip process width that exactly matches what we have seen since then: 90 nm in 2004, 65 nm in 2005-2006 and 45 nm in 2007-2008. There really isn't anything exciting about this press release from NEC.

Nanites

so when are they going to get strong enough to take over the enterprise?

Fab 28

Along similar lines, intel has announced [arstechnica.com] the opening of Fab 28 in Israel, which will be used for making processors at a 45nm scale.

Re:Fab 28

For the record, that's 7 (seven) times as awesome as the Beatles themselves. Wow!

In other news

Telescopes see farther, and batteries last longer.

From the artice: $3.5 billion for a 45nm factory?

I would have expected it to be more. But the, what do I know what these things cost? Anyone know how much the previous generation factories cost?

BS Article

Chip fab size has nothing to do with nanotech.

Moving to finer geometeries is not panning out

Moving to finer geometeries is not panning out in standard CMOS processes anymore. Currently, the Intels, AMDs, ATIs & Nvidias ship with 90nm chips. However, the transition from 130nm to 90nm has been slower than the transition from 180 to 130nm. There are several reasons for this, but primarily leakage power is becoming worse, getting good yield on 90 took the fabs years (longer than before), a lot of people got burnt when they moved too quickly from 180 to 130nm, the area savings on area & increase in performance is no longer that much moving from one process node to another ... and so on.

So, even though Intel et al are right now sampling with 65nm chips, since most ASIC companies still have to move to 90nm, I believe the move to finer geometeries will be even slower than before.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/redirect?tag=sum itgupta-20&path=tg/detail/-/1402078374/qid=1085677 524/sr=8-1/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i1_xgl14/002-9004614-239 2044?v=glance&s=books&n=507846 [amazon.com]

How does new technology cut production costs?

Wouldn't a finer, more intricate process RAISE the production cost? Poster needs to go back to college and re-take Common Sense 101.

Plenty of Room at the Bottom

Nanochem promises to allow even tinier feature sizes. The atoms in a molecule are about half a nanometer across, but they can form structures with gaps even smaller. Benzene rings have diameters also about 0.5nm, and can be made in regular arrays as nanotubes [umich.edu]. More complex structures can twist these feature spaces even closer, and in vast numbers of regular arrangement. Their production through chemical, rather than mechanical, engineering promises more efficiency, lower cost, and larger production yields.

We are now looking at the nanometer from above, pulling our micrometer structures towards the new horizon. Once across it, we will still use nanometer-scale engineering to produce picometer (and smaller) scale results.

Where's the Nanotech?

I can't see how this article has any connection with nanotechnology -- except in the sense that it's about something small, and nanotechnology is about something small. People are throwing the words "nanotechnology" and "nanotech" and nano-everything around without the foggiest idea what they mean.

CLUE: We do not have nanotechnology yet. No company today, anywhere on Planet Earth, is producing working nanomachines that do something useful. The article is about computer chips: it's as ridiculous as some company announcing a new laser pointer, and somehow linking it to Star Wars lightsabers.

Picotechnology

Nanotechnology Gets Finer

Frow now on, picotechnology it is.
Or reallyreallysmalltechnology.
You choose.

Small size = boring electronics

It used to be, back in the 90s, that you could do all kinds of cool stuff: Dynamic logic, they called it -- precharge-evaluate, domino logic, zipper logic... google 'em; they're cool. Nowadays, we can't even do that. I was talking to a guy from AMD the other day; he explained that the leakage currents and noise levels are so high that everying ends up needing to be boring old AOI CMOS. "It's not as fun for the circuit designers as it used to be," he said. Ah well.

Quantum dots!

What's the drive?

I was just thinking, what drives this evolution? Is it science-driven, or technology-driven? In other words, are there any scientific bariers left to take when reducing the size?

and...

LEON's GETTING LAERGERRRR

Some old book

Does anybody remember an old sci-fi book that talks about how the Chinese and the Japanese created miniature armies, and tried to take over the world?

hmmm..

Evolution, Progress or Technology

Not to start a debate, but let's say that The Utopians develop nanotechnology that eventually allows them to survive the change of climate from what we have now to significantly warmer. Most of the other humans (and species) die...

Is this:

  * evolution?
  * progress?
  * some kind of perverted Intelligent Design where the intelligent designers were human?

Let's say that The Utopians develop nanotechnology that eradicates, say, the Dog 'Flu (which is as effective as Ebola Zaire and contagious by air).

How do we control who gets to have these nanotechnology units installed, with the following assumptions:

  * they're EASY to produce
  * they're INEXPENSIVE even by the billions to produce ...in other words there's no economic or technical reason why the whole world couldn't be "immunised" against Dog 'Flu excepting political ones?

Intriguing; I really don't believe that the size of nanotechnology robots is the issue - the crunch is the ethics.

DSL

caos

ummm how small can it get?.... do our pocket will be also smaller.... knowing all what is up to come, dual core... quad core??... meaning BIG HEAD SINK

Cool!

Japan's NEC Electronics has developed a technology to make advanced microchips with circuitry width of 55 nanometers, or billionths of a meter...

Great, we'd be seeing Japanese nano MP3 players real soon! That should give Apple's iPod Nano a run for their money.

Nice press, but these chips ain't cheap

Finer circuitry decreases the size of a chip and cuts per-unit production costs... NOT!

Moore's Law is showing it's age... The cheapest transistors in the world are not build in 65nm. They are built in 180nm, a much older process.

In China, you can get 8-inch 180nm (.18u) wafers for $600. Today, a 90nm 8-inch wafer is more than 4X more expensive, and you cannot yet buy 65nm wafers. The cost per transistor is actually higher! And people wonder why we're taking our time to move to finer geometry processes!

EH&S issues?

I'd be interested in hearing what the course covered with respect to environmental, health and safety issues around nanomaterials. While these new materials bring interesting properties, they could also present some interesting, unexpected health hazards. By virtue of their size, nanoparticles can cross the blood/brain barrier. For some materials this new route of entry could be the difference between toxic and nontoxic. Materials that previously were thought of as nontoxic in the micron and above particle range could now have toxic effects. - Material data safety sheets generally don't consider a material's particle size, except to state "dusty" type warnings.

That the nanoparticles can have this new route of entry is proven - that this results in new toxic effects for previously nontoxic compounds is not (at least not that I've seen in the lit) - so there may be no issue - or there may be a big issue. Hopefully we don't find out the asbestos way where we make the material ubiquitous then be stuck with huge remediation and civil lawsuit issues!

Re:This sort of things always worries me

You watch WAYYYY too much television...

Re:This sort of things always worries me

The only problem with that is that almost every new technology could possible be used for "evil" purposes. Does that mean that we should never invent new technology? No. Being careful is one thing, but stopping scientific progress because of paranoia caused by a science fiction show is something different.

Re:This sort of things always worries me

"Shouldn't we stop for a second and consider the negative impact this sort of things could have on our world?"

If we did that, then virtually nothing would come to being. You can stop new technologies from being developed, but you can't stop people from doing horrible things. The best you can do is broaden your abilities to deal with disasters when they happen. I hate to go all Godwinian here, but the same technology that destroyed the World Trade Center has also been used to revolutionize the world for the better. Whaddya supposed do?

Re:This sort of things always worries me

Lead Butthead

Hmm, there must has been a general concensus when your teachers gave you this name...

Re:This sort of things always worries me

Shouldn't we stop for a second and consider the negative impact this sort of things could have on our world?

I heard that Ug-ug said that to Gok-nok when they were co-discovered fire.

Re:This sort of things always worries me

We most certainly do have to consider the potential negative impact of nanotechnology. If you don't believe Lead Butthead, maybe you'll listen to Bill Joy, author of BSD and co-founder of Sun Microsystems. In 2000, he published a fascinating article on the potential dangers of 21st century technology [wired.com], nanotechnology included.

Re:newspaper in japanese

***Extreme Offtopic Reply Warning***

It is. However, there are a lot of instances where the "n" sound (the only sound in the language not accompanied by a vowel, as opposed to others such as "na", "ni", "nu", "ne", and "no") is pronounced more like "m." For example, "shinjiru" (to believe/trust) often sounds more like "shimjiru."

Same case with "shinbun." Technically, they spelled it wrong in the summary, but it could be explained by saying they simply romanized the spelling. A similar parallele would be something like "Watashi no namae wa Takashi desu" where the "wa" is written as "ha," but most people who don't study the language are confused by the difference.

Re:This sort of things always worries me

Your fears have been fictionalized in "The Diamond Age, or: a young lady's illustrated primer", by Neal Stephenson. Read it. It's awesome.