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NEW TECHNOLOGIES: The First Nanochips
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If you have used a personal computer made in the past few years, your work was most likely processed by semiconductors built with nanometer-scale features. These immensely sophisticated microchips--or rather, nanochips--are now manufactured by the millions, yet the scientists and engineers responsible for their development receive comparatively little recognition.
The most widely accepted definition of the word nanotechnology applies to something with dimensions smaller than 100 nanometers, and the first transistor gates under this mark went into production in 2000. Integrated circuits coming to market now have gates that are a scant 50 nanometers wide. That's 50 billionths of a meter, about a thousandth the width of a human hair.
The reason to make things small is that it lowers the unit cost for each transistor. The desire for boosting the number of transistors on a chip and for running it faster explains why the semiconductor industry, just as it crossed into the new millennium, shifted from manufacturing microchips to making nanochips. How it quietly passed this milestone, and how it continues to advance, is an amazing story of people overcoming some of the greatest engineering challenges of our time--challenges every bit as formidable as those encountered in building the first atomic bomb or sending a person to the moon. A Pentium 4, for instance, contains some 42 million transistors intricately wired together.
A lot of technologies brand-new as well as seemingly antiquated are being used in nanochips production. The semiconductor industry has benefited a great deal in recent years from combinations of old and new. That it has advanced as far as it has is a testament to the ingenious ability of countless scientists and engineers to continually refine the basic method of chip manufacture, which is now more than four decades old.
Will the procedures used for fabricating electronic devices four decades down the road look anything like those currently employed? Although some futurists would argue that exotic forms of nanotechnology will revolutionize electronics by midcentury, it’s quiet probable that the semiconductor industry remains pretty much intact, having by then carried out another dazzling series of incremental technical advances, ones that are today beyond anyone's imagination.
By G. Dan Hutcheson.
G. DAN HUTCHESON is chief executive officer and president of VLSI Research Inc., a market research and economic analysis firm serving the semiconductor industry |
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| Добавлено: 30-5-2004 08:20PM |
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