FutureWatch: Chips.

"... [T]he first 30 years of the integrated circuit had from two to five times the impact on the U.S. economy, as the first 30 years of the railroad.

Or, to put it another way, the transformation of the nineteenth century U.S. economy by the railroad took 60 years, to achieve half the effect, that microelectronics had over 30 years."

Kenneth Flamm
"More for Less: The Economic Impact of Semiconductors"
December, 1997
http://www.llnl.gov/str/Sween.html

This is the result of Moore's Law, the prediction, which has held oh-so true, that the number of transistors on a chip will double every 18 months.

But this just HAS to come to and end -- doesn't it? We have, after all, read believable predictions that the lithography technologies that we currently use to build chips are running into roadblocks.

The thing is, history teaches that at least in this field, we ALWAYS find ways around, or through, every roadblock that comes up. And it doesn't seem as if that's going to change:

Near Term.

Encouraging news is coming from Extreme Ultraviolet LLC, a consortium of big chip names that are working hard to make small chips (http://www.intel.com/pressroom/archive/releases/CN091197.HTM):

Brought to our attention by RCFoC reader Grant Perkins, the Jan. 11 ZDNet News (http://netscape.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,2673824,00.html) describes how the consortium plans to use "extreme UV light," which has a shorter wavelength than the light used to etch today's .13 micron chips, to create future chips with features as small as .07 microns (70 nanometers). One benefit of such tiny elements is that these chips will run at 10 GHz!

But this isn't as far as EUV will likely go -- they expect that this technology can eventually create chips with elements as small as .03 microns (30 nanometers), and perhaps even smaller.

A very readable overview of what's involved in this process is available from Lawrence Livermore Labs at http://www.llnl.gov/str/Sween.html . While describing the EUV process, this paper gives us a fascinating glimpse into just how "perfect" the components of an EUV system must be:

"...the total thickness of each mirror's coating must deviate less than an atom."

This is not your father's shaving mirror.

Nor is it science fiction -- "We expect to have the first full field-scanned images by April 1," says Lawrence Livermore's director for EUV, Chuck Gwyn.

There's another contending technology for our future chips called "Electron Beam Lithography," or "E-beam." The major difference is that EUV technology essentially "prints" each layer of a chip all at once (similar to the way a photographic enlarger imprints an entire picture on a piece of paper with one quick exposure.) E-beam, however, uses an electron beam to individually draw every tiny feature on a chip, line by line. It's the difference between a parallel and a serial process. So for E-beam technology to compete with EUV, it will have to draw very, very fast.

Which of these technologies will win the hearts of our next generations of chips? It seems as if EUV has the edge at the moment, but we never know. And as we're about to see, there's always the opportunity for a dark horse technology to pop up, and to change all the rules.

This is an excerpt from the "Rapidly Changing Face of Computing, " a free weekly multimedia technology journal written by Jeffrey R. Harrow, Principal Member of Technical Staff for the Corporate Strategy group at Compaq. A more extensive version of this discussion, as well as others around the innovations and trends of contemporary computing and the technologies that drive them, are available at http://www.compaq.com/rcfoc . Jeff's opinions do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Compaq. The RCFoC is a service of, and Copyright 2000, Compaq Computer Corp."