IBM technologist claims semiconductor scaling dead

Spinner

Bernie Meyerson, IBM's chief technology officer, is claiming that traditional semiconductor scaling died somewhere between 0.13-micron and 0.09-micron.

"This lithographic definition of process technology is absolutely meaningless," said Meyerson, referring to the custom of labeling manufacturing processes with a number designed to correspond to the minimum geometries defined in the process or the half-pitch of the most aggressive interconnect structures. "Somewhere between 130-nm and 90-nm the whole system fell apart. Things stopped working and nobody seemed to notice." He added, "Scaling is already dead but nobody noticed it had stopped breathing and its lips had turned blue."

Source: Techreport

Thrax

It's true. The 130nm to 90nm transition is one of the hardest ever, with many people stopping short at 100nm as in the case of memory manufacturers.

Hardware engineers have had to try entirely new materials, and develop entirely new ideas.

Diamonds, for example, are a strong probability for gate logic. They can run hotter than hell, they're atomically very very stable.

Manufacturers still haven't ever investigated GaAs fabrication to the fullest extent which would prove an alternate to silicon. GaAs in and of itself in photovoltaic applications needs only 1/20th of the thickness of crystalline silicon to reach peak energy transfer efficiency (READ: Little leakage). I assume the same would apply to computers.. But the fact that it's more rare than gold and is a byproduct of smelting aluminum and zinc makes it cost-prohibitive right now.

And there are still several ideas in development that are set to take us well through 2015 as far as speed increases, low-leak applications are concerned:

Silicon on Insulator
Strained Silicon
Tri-gate transistors
EUV lithography
Quantum computing (Trite, I know)
BBUL packaging
FD-SOI
EBP Lithography
Immersion lithography

And scientists, I'm sure, are looking into replacing nitrided silicon oxide as the main alloy for transistors. Carbon nanotubes are a possibility, and we've talked about diamonds.

But beyond that, even CMOS (Not the one on your motherboard) still has many years left in it down to probably the 90 nanometer process, MAYBE the 65nm process as well. The 65nm process, I think, is where we'll start seeing things like immersion lithography as the middle road to current lithographic techniques and EUV, the switch from silicon dioxide transistors to something else (Diamonds?).. FD-SOI could be big, and IBM's push on carbon nanotubes might heat up.