Chris Phoenix is providing live blog coverage for us on all the presentations from an important conference on Productive Nanosystems: Launching the Technology Roadmap...
Next talk: Information Technology: Toward the Atomic Scale
Thomas Theis, Director, Physical Sciences, IBM Watson Research Center
He starts by saying he likes being at a meeting where people are interested in making small things, not just developing new knowledge.
With regard to the semiconductor roadmap, to which the PN Roadmap has been compared: it's headed toward atomic resolution, but it's not focused on it. The semiconductor roadmap is focused on the next generation device (half the area of the current devices). It's good to have a longer-term focus.
He'll be talking about top-down, bottom-up, and integration of them. In real life, there's no purely top-down or bottom-up manufacturing process. And rather than talking about theory of energy vs. information vs. time in manufacturing, he'll talk about "whatever works."
Semiconductors are driving top-down small-dimension manufacturing. Conventional optics (with near-field correction--very expensive) can apparently get down to 22 nm features. [How's that for breaking the diffraction limit!]
In fact, he thinks that "top-down" can be taken all the way to atomic precision. The "millipede" scanning probe array may be used as a lithography tool, not just a storage device. You can write and erase bit patterns millions of times without wearing out the tips. But, despite 6 terabits per square inch, 4096-tip arrays, and hard disk speeds, this will probably not be a product... it'll be outcompeted by solid-state non-volatile memory. But they won't throw it away - they'll try to use it for lithography.
The resolution of the millipede is "quite a bit better than a nanometer." Heat up the tip enough, it evaporates the polymer, so it can do line crossing (without snow-plowing the polymer into the first line). 12-15 nm line width is "no problem."
Controlled electrochemistry with atomic precision: attach gold atoms to pentacene, covalently. Can change the charge state of the pentacene, because it's on an ionic solid (sodium chloride) which can reshuffle itself. This reduces the energy required to do reactions. So you can build some room-temperature-stable structures.
IBM is beating the semiconductor roadmap: air-gap dielectric. Block copolymer can make a coating with very small holes. Those holes can be used as a resist to etch air gaps. (Actually, vacuum, if I understood correctly.)
Carbon nanotube FET (field effect transistor). They coat a nanotube with insulator and metal, put electrodes around it, and voila.
DNA shapes are a possibility for future circuit-building; maybe not in 10 years.
Summary: Practical manufacturing will increasingly incorporate "bottom-up" chemistry.
Question: Do you see hydrogen depassivation scaling to wafer-scale? A: [Basically, probably not, but it may well be useful for other things.]
Chris Phoenix
Tags: nanotechnology nanotech nano science technology ethics weblog blog
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