14 years ahead of the forecasts for the rate of miniaturization in the industry
Avi Blizovsky
https://www.hayadan.org.il/nano111202.html
IBM unveiled the world's smallest silicon transistor, which is six nanometers long - one part 20,000ths of the thickness of one hair.
The length of the new transistor comes very close to the molecular size limits of silicon itself, at an unprecedented level of miniaturization.
The new transistor is ten times smaller than the transistors currently in current production. An international consortium of semiconductor companies that last year published the predicted road map for the industry, predicted that in order to maintain the rate of improvement in system performance, transistors smaller than 9 nanometers (one billionth of a meter) will be required only in 2016. IBM is the first company in the world to produce a transistor Works with even smaller gate dimensions.
The ability to build a working transistor with such dimensions allows for a hundredfold increase in the number of transistors on a single chip of a given size compared to what is known today. In the production process of this transistor, IBM managed to overcome the known limitations of miniaturization processes, primarily the precision and density of the use of power that enables the production of the chip, very close to the molecular level of the silicon itself.
Reducing the gate size of a transistor - the size of the switch that moves the circuit from an on state to an off state - improves the performance and speed of the computer chip, and reduces production and operating costs in terms of current consumption per switching operation. The information systems industry has been miniaturizing transistors for over thirty years, in order to meet the demand for smaller and smarter electronic devices.
The miniaturization down to the molecular level proves that the structure and the basic concept of a transistor continue to function even in these dimensions. In the future, additional technological innovations will be required in order to simultaneously achieve high performance - and manage current consumption and heat emission. The results of IBM's research and development will lead to further work in the area of extremely dense and small silicon components, and will allow scientists to introduce new structures in the design of these chips.
The success in developing the new transistor is based on reducing the thickness of the silicon wafer on insulator (SOI), which IBM scientists used. The thickness of the silicon body of the new transistor is only 4-8 nanometers, which is enough for it to demonstrate precise on and off performance. The embossing of the conductor stripes on the silicon wafer was done with a lithography (photo) process at a wavelength of 248 nm. IBM researchers hypothesize that reducing the thickness of the silicon wafer on top of an insulator will allow further reduction of CMOS components.
The results of IBM's new research are presented this week at a professional conference in San Francisco.
IBM's research division is the world's largest research organization in the field of information technologies, with over 3,500 scientists and researchers in six countries, including about 500 researchers in Israel at IBM's research laboratories in Haifa, Rehovot and Tel Aviv.
For information on the New Scientist website
This topic is also mentioned at the end of yesterday's news: "Problems in the Nano Land"
