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Science Technology

New Horizon For Nanotech 28

Posted by Hemos from the everyday-things-are-getting-smaller dept.
UserID 3.14 writes "It looks like faster chip-building tehnology is coming, and it may usher in the next wave of MEMS and nanotechnology with it. This article from Science Daily talks about a new electron-beam photolithography machine at JPL that rasterizes 10 times faster than the previous standard with a beam imprint that's half the size. Chip prototyping will go faster and the researchers there will be able to deal with features that are molecule-sized. Best of all, if you want to use the machine, they give a contact for further info."
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New Horizon For Nanotech More

New Horizon For Nanotech

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  • Having said this, it strikes me as extremely unlike that we will ever have open-source CPUs

    Oh, but we already have. Ranging from 8-bitters to the LEON (32 bit SPARC implementation, written under ESA contract).

    Of course, there is a lot more to open source hardware than just CPUs, just look at OpenCores [opencores.org].

  • JPL... is that their sticker symbol? :).
  • Essentially, this is a PR statement released by NASA/JPL bragging about the new toy they've got. They didn't design it, they didn't build it, they haven't done anything with it yet, and it's not the only one of its kind.

    They just replaced a really old system, and decided they could get some PR value from that. [shrug]

  • Quote: "We want to let researchers from universities, private industry and other government institutions know that we now have this capability and that it is available for their use," said Dr. Barbara Wilson, chief technologist for JPL." Unquote

    Nothing wrong with that imho

    Nope, nothing wrong with that. But (a) chances are good that this PR release wasn't primarily directed at those researchers, (b) putting a reference to this on Slashdot seems silly, and (c) the Slashdot story title was really overblown.

    Oh, yeah, and (d) it annoys me that the distinction between what's an article and what's a press release seems to be lost on most people. (Including many journalists, it seems.)

  • This allows basically 2-d nanostructures. But we're still building it in the "macro" fashion: doing templates, using bulk chemical processes for "developing", etc. I can see this leading to a nanoscale manipulating arm, but this is just a step on the road. We'll be at genuine nanotech when we can do molecular nanoconstruction on the single-atom/molecule/fragment scale, in three dimensions. When will THAT be ?? No clue, but I'm hoping for under 10 years. . .
  • If the beam size is 1/2 as small, it will take 4x as long to pattern the same area.* So the 10x increase in rasterization is really 10/4 or approximately 2x increase in wafer throughput. Even with this, a full wafer (especially the new 12 inch Si wafers) will take hours/days maybe weeks to pattern. It will be good for research (especially the smaller beam width), but not for production.


    *Of course, if you can scale all the circuits by 2x then you don't need as much area, but device and transmission line scaling doesn't work that way...


    no sig here

  • No, tunneling is still a problem, especially in the gate oxides on MOS devices. However, they don't tell us their beam size for this system, only that it is half of the system it replaces (that was 12 years old I believe?). This leads me to think this system has a resolution on the order of 10 nm. Gate oxides under 3 nm are the ones that begin seeing larger tunneling currents (to become a concern).

  • Pshaw! (Score:1)

    by Alik ( 81811 )
    Those guys over in the Data Storage Systems Center ain't got nothin' on the one true CMU MEMS Lab [cmu.edu]. Oh, sure, they've got genuine applications that people actually need and that can show a profit and stuff, but we've got weird far-reaching projects like microstructured scaffolds for growing engineered tissues! (Don't bother looking; it's not linked from the page 'cause the website never gets updated.)Why, we've got genuine doctors (with MDs and everything!) working with us to build new biosensors! *And* we've got a display case!

    Anyway, I'm sure we'll be turning out profitable projects any day now. No, really. Just wait.
  • I thought once you got down below a certain scale electrons had this nasty habit of magically jumping between semiconductor plates. How did they solve that problem? Or is the scale they're working at still too big? Just curious -- I haven't heard anyone griping about the problem lately and didn't hear that it'd been solved.
  • From the article:
    For NASA, this means breakthroughs in miniaturization that could lead to significant reductions in mass and cost of spacecraft to look for traces of life on distant planets. For researchers, it means access to one of only three such systems in the world, and the only one in the public sector devoted to pure research for building the nano-scale devices of the future.
    OH great... Just great! Now when we discover life "out there" our ambassadors to them will be little critters put into a capsule and shot across the galaxy. What the hell are those aliens gonna think when they discover that we're not all the size of nanobots?
  • Depends on how you're counting. For several years now, nanotech researchers have been building real, workable nanomachines that actually _do stuff_ (e.g., motors, lasers, etc.) However, to date, none of them have been reliable enough or cheap enough to be used for any large-scale applications. This may be the first step in moving nanotech out of the lab and into industry. So in that sense it's the "first wave" from the engineer's perspective, but the "next wave" from the scientist's.

  • and it may usher in the next wave of MEMS and nanotechnology with it

    The 'Next Wave' of nanotech? I don't think there was a first wave, unless you consider the masterbatory fantasies of extropians and sci-fi worshippers.

    Oh wait, they're the same thing...


    --

  • Boy, I can't wait 'till we have open hardware! That would be so cool. Maybe after that, we can move even further on, and have "Open Source" engineering. Wouldn't it be great to know that the bridge you're driving across of the skyscraper you work in weren't designed by professionals, but by the community during their spare time? Boy, that idea just excites me so much!


    --
  • Either that or they're gonna wonder where these massive virulent slavedrivers came from and what the hell they think they're doing oppressing these poor little nanobots!
  • What the hell are those aliens gonna think when they discover that we're not all the size of nanobots?

    They're gonna think, "whoops! Maybe we should've brought the BIG ray guns!"

  • Boy, I can't wait 'till we have open hardware! That would be so cool. Maybe after that, we can move even further on, and have "Open Source" engineering. Wouldn't it be great to know that the bridge you're driving across of the skyscraper you work in weren't designed by professionals, but by the community during their spare time? Boy, that idea just excites me so much!

    Hey, it could work. Just think how much easier it would be to spot bugs!

    [Cell phone rings]

    "Yea hi. I'm going over the Red Hat bridge right now..."

    *CREEEEK*

    "Aw, crap."
  • I'm just hoping that they've perfected this stuff by the time I'm around 50 and heart disease starts being a problem for me.

    Hopefully, they'll have a nanobot that can go about my arteries, sweeping cholestrol away!

  • Cool! (Score:5)

    by atrowe ( 209484 ) on Wednesday April 25, 2001 @05:54AM (#266366)
    The article doesn't mention cost, but I would assume that this technology would be signifigantly cheaper than the billions of dollars it currently takes to open a semiconducter fab. This decreased cost will make it possible for the technology to create cheap, powerful processors available to the masses.

    This would also make it possible for the open-source movement to expand into hardware as well as software. Imagine renting time at the local fab to sample a processor that was designed entirely by the community. If this technology pans out, we could eventually adapt all the advantages of today's open-source software into low cost open-source hardware. I can't wait to see what advances in microprocessor technology will evolve once the open-source community sets it's mind to developing a free(as in speech) processor. Yay!

  • They just replaced a really old system, and decided they could get some PR value from that. [shrug]

    Quote: "We want to let researchers from universities, private industry and other government institutions know that we now have this capability and that it is available for their use," said Dr. Barbara Wilson, chief technologist for JPL. Unquote

    Nothing wrong with that imho

    vinlud
  • It could be due to NSF/DOE/NIH/... dumping a ton of cash into the big Nanotech Initiative. Anyone who had the right combination of buzzwords in their proposal got funded.

    You could be seeing the results of that.

  • vacuous press release (Score:3)

    by dr. loser ( 238229 ) on Wednesday April 25, 2001 @05:05PM (#266369)
    E-beam lithography is not new. This press release contained frustratingly little actual information. *All* e-beam machines (except projection systems like SCALPEL [bell-labs.com]) raster an electron beam. That's why e-beam lithography is historically slow - it's a serial process.

    I've done extensive nanofabrication, and these guys have chosen their words so carefully as to be misleading. When they talk about making structures on the "subcellular" scale for biological research, it sounds impressive but really isn't. A typical red blood cell is 5 microns across. The smallest features produced photolithographically for your Athlon are 0.13 microns across. Even more annoying is their claim of molecular and submolecular scale device size without actually naming a number. Molecules can be big - DNA can be many microns long when uncoiled.

    A meaningful figure of merit for resolution is: how small a feature can you pattern in resist and then transfer to an underlying substrate, either by etching or through metallization. Fundamentally, e-beam lithography's resolution is limited by the choice of resist, the physics of the development process, and the subsequent pattern transfer step. Making features smaller in width than 10 nm (roughly 40 atoms) is exceedingly hard, even in isolation. Doing that regularly, at production speeds with sub-10 nm registration across a 30 cm wafer, is industrially unachievable right now.

    As far as I can tell, this is not a breakthrough in any way, shape, or form. This kind of overhype worries me. It's almost worse than the utopian claptrap from people like Drexler - everyone with a clue know Drexler is a loon, but people may actually believe spokespeople from JPL....

  • Hurrah.

    Now they can design and make chips even faster. Now they can make even more powerful chips.

    If they, 'they' being major chip manufacturers are to make chips go through even faster, that high end gaming rig you bought last month just might be able to keep up with the chip released this month.

    Don't get me wrong, I like the fact that hardware can be developed faster. It's just that as things are, my 'gaming rig' is a duron850 with a 16 meg video card. Nothing high end, but it runs sweet and stable. Despite being a windows box.

    Anyways, I just want to know, how fast exactly will the chips be going? And will it shatter Moore's law into oblivion?

  • Even though this new system is 10 times faster than their previous rig, e-beam litho is a very slow method of pattern writing. The smaller spot size should be great for research into two dimensional structures. While this is cool, there must be university research that's pushing the envelope even more than this. This doesn't seem like front page material to me. Anyone have any links to an even faster rastered or smaller spot sized rig (although the article didn't give any numbers IIRC)?

  • Bowie, I don't know why you're saying (and so rudely!) that VA Linux have not done the right thing by the investor community. I personally bought some shares of @LNUX a few weeks ago for $1.56 each, and have since almost doubled my money! I think they are an excellent company with very strong growth potential.

    I just think it's sad to see people writing unpleasant messages on web boards to try to influence stock prices downwards and harm other people's valuable investments.

  • Open source hardware will not happen. People do not build things for free.

    It might happen. You just interpret the word free wrongly. Open source hardware just means the specs were created by a non-profit community. However, to actually get one of those chips you will have to pay. Pretty much like buying a linux distro. The only difference is that they do not toast it onto a CD but onto a chip. The only difference is that you won't be able to download the result for free or apply patches yourself

    Having said this, it strikes me as extremely unlike that we will ever have open-source CPUs

  • Re:Cool! (Score:3)

    by OxideBoy ( 322403 ) on Wednesday April 25, 2001 @07:42AM (#266374) Homepage
    E-beam lith is far, far more expensive than your stock CMOS fab. While you can do some nifty things, the fact remains it is a slow batch process that, in order to be scaled up to the same production level as the standard process, would probably require at least an order of magnitude larger capital investment.

    This will be a nice toy for chip designers and exotic devices, but any feasible mass-production 'nano'tech will almost certainly require a high degree of self-assembly, which e-beam lith is not.

  • I work for a small shop [jmind.com] (I'm also the webmaster for this site, so please keep laughter down to a minimum) in Massachusetts that buys and resells/refurbishes semiconductor manufacturing equipment. As of the last six months, our orders for e-beam vacuum systems have practically increased 5X. Wonder if a lot more experimenting with this stuff is happening at Universities than we think. Normally, I just might attribute the increase in sales to the market, but the market is down right now, and sales are up. Well, in any event, I hope this makes Moore's law extend a bit...

  • MEMS based storage (Score:4)

    by sllort ( 442574 ) on Wednesday April 25, 2001 @06:45AM (#266376) Homepage Journal
    While we're dropping cool terms in the story header, let's pretend for a moment that no one knows what MEMS based storage is, and give them the link to the MEMS Research Unit [cmu.edu] at CMU, where they are prototyping and developing this stuff right now.

    The short story is that it's a very small sled containing magnetic data (on a substrate) that is pushed by very small actuators of an assembly over read/write heads. It fits on the price/speed/storage curve somewhere in between hard drives and Flash. If you want to know more from people who actually know what they're talking about, read the intro and then click on their research papers.

    I sure wish you could buy the stuff, but it's still a few years from primetime.

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