Microchips...
..And The Quantum Theory

Until recently, microchip designers would have kept away from anything in the Quantum theory front. Quantum Theory, is a term applied to the behaviour of atoms and subatomic particles. Microchip designers are bringing out more advanced and faster chips to match the increasingly tiny transistors. They rather not think about what would happen if transistors were to continue in their diminishing mode and reach a size of 25 nanometers. This would lead to electrons to start defying the conventional laws of Physics. This is when Quantum Theory would take over and the chips would start misbehaving.

Though we may have far to go before such a scenario takes place, the researchers at The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California may have come up with something to overcome such a threatening possibility altogether. According to their findings, Quantum Theory and microchip designing may bond together and actually find ways to shrink transistors further without adverse effects.

Fundamentally, chip manufacturing is very much like film processing and printing. A photosensitive surface, a chip design template, receives a beam of light. Acting like a negative, the template gets a pattern etched on it to form the transistors. This process is what is known as Optical Lithography.

With smaller transistors, chip manufacturersapply lights of smaller wavelengths. Usually, diffraction is the method used. Diffraction allows deep ultraviolet rays, generated by lasers, to pass through optical systems. This decreases their wavelengths even further. As per current approaches, it is impossible to decrease the size of transistors beyond 124 nanometers with 180-220 nanometer lightwaves currently in use.

Ways and means to generate smaller beams are in various stages of development. One approach has ultraviolet light with shorter wavelengths, thesecond uses X-rays and the third attempts to do the trick with beams of electrons. However, chip manufacturers find all of the above either time-consuming or uneconomical. This is exactly where the recent Quantum Physics paper gets the advantageous edge.

It basically exploits " one of the weird quantum effects". As is known, photons are least interactive. But in rare cases one or two photons may get entangled thus acting together in a strange manner. This correlation once effected, they may influence each other even at a distance. The paper suggests something akin to this. It begins by linking crystals of Pottasium diphosphate or Pottasium triphosphate with laser beams of small wavelength. The result is a large number of entangled photons.

These are then targeted towards two slits. Lights of various kinds with a diffractive effect pass through the slits and form certain typical patterns on the other side. The entangled photons squeezed through the slits have tremendous energy. On recombining at the other end they form wavelength of almost half the size otherwise formed with normal photons. As per this paper, a normal 248-nanometer laser could be effectively reduced to 62 nanometers to bring about transistors of the same size. This breaks all barriers of conventional current approaches to chip manufacturing.

The possibilities do not end here. Three or more photons could be entangled to bring about smaller circuitry. These methods may however take many more years to come by. Sceptics do not doubt the scientific possibility but they foresee technical bottlenecks in the factory floors.

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