A step closer to the future…

While reading a popular article about nanoscience, i am hooked up with this name again.. Gordon Moore. This guy, the later co-founder of Intel Corp, is so marvelous, as amazing as the visionist Feynmann (hope it’s a fair comparison).

on those early days of the rising of Integrated circuits (IC’s), Moore was interviewed by an electronic magazine, for a report on how semiconductor component would grow and develop in the future and a prediction for the next decade. At these early days, around 60 components on a chip had been able integrated by Moore group. Amazingly, he started from the first planar transistors to extrapolate 60 000 components on a chip by using semi log paper ONLY. 10 year passed, This corresponded to a double very year. And, still, he was surprised how precisely his prediction had been meet. Of course, a lot of development kept on going since then. On Route, Moore’s law has been applied to many developments beyond integration density on cips. For example, the increase of data storage performance of hard discs also refers to Moore’s law. In fact, seems that everyhing in industry that increases exponentially in performance, is always referred to Moore’s Law.

However, the atomic structure of matter, of course, will some day set limits to the evolution of the integration technology accorrding to Moore’s law. Historically, limits had been anticipated much earlier, and surpassed. For example, in the early days, it was thought that gate oxide thickness could probably not be dropped much below 100 nm because the probability of pinholes increased. Nevertheless, gate oxide thickness now approached 1 nm. The rapidly increasing tunnelling currents represent the next challenge. A solution may be novel dielectric oxides with improved permittivities. Another classic issue has been optical lithography. In the early days, it was believed that limit would be 1 micrometer. Nevertheless, the principle has been extended to 0,1 micrometer. And even by using soft X-rays, as we call it today, extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography, A 10nm lithography scale has been reached. This, of course, will set a bunch of further applications in electronics. A new age will come.

So.. what is next? and what the limit will be? Challenges always make science exciting…

~~on the shoulders of giants~~

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