![]() ![]() The job is far from over, Khare says, acknowledging, “Seven nanometer still has significant challenges. This is something that one cannot do alone. “IBM research is leading this effort and we work hand in hand with our other partners, particularly GLOBALFOUNDARIES and Samsung. “We can demonstrate capabilities and structure on realistic fab tools.” Of course, that greatly increases confidence that the chips can be produced economically enough to be commercially successful.īut the collaboration extends beyond the tooling capabilities into all areas of advanced logic technology. “We can scale to actual tooling, so we can ensure we have the right kind of properties that will scale properly,” says Khare. If it costs too much to produce them, they won’t be successful. That’s important because the new chips not only have to be small and efficient, they also have to be economically viable. He calls it “a dream come true.” The Albany, NY, research center not only has a 24/7 lab, but also, thanks to tooling partners, the capability of a full-fledged “fab,” a research facility with fabrication capabilities. Khare credits the unique partnership and facilities at CNSE with much of the success. ![]() And they replaced standard silicon with silicon germanium in the channels on the chips that conduct electricity. To produce the 7 nm chip, the team employed a new type of lithography in the manufacturing process, Extreme Ultraviolet, or EUV, which delivers huge improvements over today’s mainstream optical lithography. In production, transistors are “printed” on a silicon wafer through a complex process called lithography. To answer those questions, the research team came up with some novel processes and techniques. Can we increase their speed not only by physical geometry, which is important, but also by changing the materials that we use, or by changing the chemistry we are using to coat and etch these films?” At the end of the day, it’s the speed at which they operate that matters. Can these transistors perform? They need to be able to switch on and off and have the proper transistor performance. ![]() “The other part is the electrical aspect. “One front is being able to build these structures, to be able to etch them and make them physically viable,” he says. Going beyond the 7 nm laboratory breakthrough was not without challenges, admits Khare. And we’re talking really small - 100,000 times smaller than the width of a human hair and about two and half times the circumference of a strand of your DNA. So the new transistors are at least half the current size. Putting that further into perspective, consider that most of the chips in use today use 22 nm or 14 nm technology. That’s roughly 10 times as many as are found on today’s chips. That breakthrough could result in being able to place more than 20 billion transistors on a fingernail-size chip. In July 2015, they unveiled the semiconductor industry’s first 7 nm (nanometer) test chips with functioning transistors. With that approach, Khare’s team, partnering with GLOBALFOUNDRIES and Samsung at SUNY Polytechnic Institute’s Colleges of Nanoscale Science and Engineering (SUNY Poly CNSE), accomplished that. At a physical level, we still want to make things smaller, but how we do that requires very different concepts and ideas at more fundamental and materials level… it used to be more geometry.” “Now it’s all about introducing new materials, new structures, new innovations,” Khare says. Signals can “bleed” more easily between them, for example. And their very scale and proximity can affect electrical properties. As they get smaller, they become much harder to imprint on the chips. ![]() So, what about those laws of physics? Well, in the march toward ever-smaller chips, simply shrinking the transistors is not a solution. “From a systems perspective, we continue to put more and more transistors on a chip so we can have more and more complex functions, integrate them to increase performance of our systems and reduce power.” And they’re critical for big computer systems as well. As electronic devices become smaller and more ubiquitous, “putting more transistors on a chip is the way we can continue to bring more value, more functionality, lower cost and lower power consumption,” he explains. He sees a promising future for adding lots more transistors, the minute engines of computation. Khare, who’s responsible for all semiconductor research at IBM, believes the challenges of physics can be overcome. Increasing the number of circuits on silicon chips, say critics, has reached its limits, and computing will stall at its current level until a substitute approach can be found. But in recent years the progression has been slowed, some say stopped, by the laws of physics. That phenomenon - which became known as Moore’s Law - meant faster, more powerful computers. For decades, the number of tiny transistors studding integrated circuit chips has doubled every two years. ![]()
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