IBM set to unleash minuscule chip ever

As today’s advance lithographic techniques strive to cram more and more bits to silicon and squeeze fraction of micron wide logic gates and wires onto the surface of silicon , IBM researchers are all set to reveal the details of a breakthrough in chip-making lithography that will lead to the production of ultra-small & thin microprocessors.This  breakthrough will be unveiled at the SPIE Microlithography conference in San Jose on 20 February, 2006.

Chipmakers are continually seeking to reduce the size of chip components and cram more transistors on to silicon as they extend the 40-year-old Moore’s Law. It predicts that the number of transistors on a chip will double every 18 months to two years. Achieving further miniaturization can increase performance, reduce power consumption and create cost savings. The industry has a target of reducing circuit widths from 90nm to 65nm-45nm, moving on to 32nm. Intel is leading the way with its processors now switching over to 65nm. But the industry has seen 32nm as the limit for existing optical lithography techniques – where ultra-violet light is beamed by lasers through stencils to “print” circuits on chips.

However, staff at IBM Research have created structures on a processor measuring 29.9 nanometres, using a high-index immersion variant of deep-ultraviolet optical lithography. This is 3,000 times thinner than a human hair and one-third the size of the 90nm circuits currently dominating production in the chip industry. Optical lithography has been in use for some time and it was thought it would need to be abandoned in the coming years; however, this development by IBM means the process needn't be phased out just yet. The IBM announcement also gives the industry time to come up with new manufacturing processes for increasingly smaller chips.
"Our goal is to push optical lithography as far as we can so that the industry does not have to move to any expensive alternatives until absolutely necessary," said Dr Robert D Allen, manager of lithography materials at IBM's Almaden Research Centre."This result is the strongest evidence to date that the industry may have at least seven years of breathing room before any radical changes in chip-making techniques are needed."