Melting Microchip Defects May Extend Moore's Law

schliz lets us know about research out of Princeton on melting away defects on microchips using a laser. The new technique, termed Self-Perfection by Liquefaction (SPEL), was published in the May 4 issue of Nature Nanotechnology. Researchers have traditionally approached chip defects by trying to improve the microchip fabrication process, but this eventually reaches fundamental physical limits to do with random behavior of electrons and photons. By focussing on fixing defects, the new method enables more precise shaping of microchip components, and engineers expect to dramatically improve chip quality without increasing fabrication cost. The before-and-after images are remarkable. Here's a diagram of how the process works.

Before and after pics

[tgd (2822)]

Whew yeah, those are amazing. World-changing, even.

What am I looking at?

read the article

[emj (15659)]

here is a larger version [princeton.edu]

Re:read the article

[dreamchaser (49529)]

He should have known what he was looking at just from the summary, but I agree that people should RTFA before they ask silly questions.

It's really quite an impressive difference, the before and after shots.

Re:

[wattrlz (1162603)]

There's an obligatory, "you must be new here" to tack on to that, but it seems the hackneyed old memes are finally growing annoying.

It really never ceases to amaze me how much silicon wants to form into neat geometric shapes. Please don't tell the creationists about this one.

Re:

[Yetihehe (971185)]

Just RTFA please, there is bigger image there.

Re:

[tgd (2822)]

I think you may be missing the subtle sarcasm and passing commentary on the quality of Slashdot editors...

Re:

[emj (15659)]

maybe they wanted to save the host some bandwidth.

Re:

[Yetihehe (971185)]

It was clearly too subtle. I believe slashdot editors are just someone who clicks "submit" button and sometimes add line of text trying to be witty.

Sharks

[adpsimpson (956630)]

Where do the frikin' sharks come in to it?

Re:Sharks

[Brian Gordon (987471)]

Yeah, giving robots lasers that they can use to repair computer chips.. what could go wrong.

Re:

[dintech (998802)]

I dunno, it can hardly we worse than giving a toolbox to the crazies at Geek Squad.

Corrected picture link

[bopo_the_mofo (888877)]

here... http://www.princeton.edu/pr/pictures/a-f/chou/Chou_micrographs.jpg [princeton.edu]

Re:

[harry666t (1062422)]

Hm, can I use these images as textures in my new map I'm making for Duke Nukem Forever?

Better Before and After

[Garganus (890454)]

better link: http://www.princeton.edu/pr/pictures/a-f/chou/ [princeton.edu]

Not really fixing...

[emj (15659)]

I was imagining a laser doing touchups on really bad places of the chip to remove shortcircuits and stuff like that. But this seems like another step in the process of making chips.

A bit like drying pulp to get paper.

Anonymous Coward

[by Anonymous Coward]

Scientists really need to stop using lasers to fix microchips and start using them for something practical.

For instance, death rays.

Re:Anonymous Coward

[Culture20 (968837)]

Scientists really need to stop using lasers to fix microchips and start using them for something practical.

Popcorn?

Misleading title?

[Lonewolf666 (259450)]

The described process seems to bring essentially correct structures into a more regular shape by melting them and letting surface tension do the rest.

I doubt it could fix a "real" defect, like two neighboring structures that were fused by accident during manufacturing.

Re:Misleading title?

[teslar (706653)]

I doubt it could fix a "real" defect

Irregular shapes are a "real" defect. From the first paragraph of TFA:

even tiny defects in the lines, dots and other shapes etched on them become major barriers to performance

Re:

[Lonewolf666 (259450)]

Performance? So the chip would fall into a lower speed category but still be usable.
I define "real" defects as "does not work at all".

Re:Misleading title?

[cowscows (103644)]

Then you're much more forgiving than most people.

If a chip is designed to run at a certain speed, but manufacturing flaws make it run slower, then it a very real sense the chip didn't work. The fact that it still is possible to use the chip for some things doesn't mean that it's not broken.

I once rode home a bike that had one of the pedals broken off. It took longer than usual, because I was travelling at a lower speed, but by your definition my bike didn't have a defect. In my opinion, a missing pedal is pretty darn broken.

Fake !!!

[daveime (1253762)]

How much funding do these people get ?

It's obvious they've just used the BBC testcard and Photoshopped out the girl, clown and blackboard.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/cult/classic/classic/images/640/testcard.jpg [bbc.co.uk]

Stands out a mile, obvious fake ... the original was bigger than 162 x 169 pixels also ;-)

quick explanation

[anmida (1276756)]

I'm a materials scientist, so hopefully I can explain this quickly for you all :)

The images that are given (before and after) are some scanning electron microscope images. Think optical microscope except with electrons. Anyway, there is a serious improvement in the structure - the edges are a lot cleaner and more defined. This is a really simple and beautiful way of letting Nature do the hard work for us. What this is doing is liquifing the material and letting surface tension pull it into the lowest-energy configuration (least amount of surface area locally).

It's really a neat way of doing it, because fabrication is really tough - uses either chemical etching or some method of particle bombardment to remove atoms. There's a big trend in matsci to build down, and build up, at the same time at the nanoscale. Think of this as the "error-correction" process after fabrication.

--This is not the same as annealing - annealing is a solid-state process, putting energy into the material to enable atoms to move and remove stress and other small defects from the material.

Hope that helps :)

Re:

[by Anonymous Coward]

I see some major issues with this in real world semiconductor manufacturing. They are depending on the surface tension of the molten liquid to straighten the lines. You will need very specific materials for this - the commonly used materials such as photoresists and dielectrics used to generate the patterns do not melt - they vaporize. The bottom surface has to be extremely "hydro"phobic (or phobic to the material).

You could possibly use a metal. The only metal that can be melted and patterned - Aluminum, i

They did it with semiconductor, thats why its cool

[GanjaManja (946130)]

quote from article:

Simple melting by direct heating has previously been shown to smooth out the defects in plastic structures.
This process can't be applied to a microchip for two reasons. First, the key structures on a chip are not made of plastic, which melts at temperatures close to the boiling point of water, but from semiconductors and metals, which have much higher melting points.
Heating the chip to such temperatures would melt not just the structures, but nearly everything else on the chip. Se

Re:

[jadin (65295)]

I couldn't think of a car one but I came up with cookie one.

You know how most cookies are round lumpy balls of dough that when you cook them ooze out into a flat circle cookie? It's like that. Big lumpy ball of cpu thingies becomes flat circle cpu thingies.

Mmmm cookies.

Re:

[Colonel Korn (1258968)]

I'm guessing the main difference is that the laser causes very localized surface heating rather than isotropic heating throughout the sample.

Also, this process is beautifully simple. We do this in my field, too, but using polymers in almost exactly the same process. I haven't seen a picture in my field nearly as convincing as the SEMs in this project, however.

It's like a microchip...

[TheVelvetFlamebait (986083)]

... but made with lasers!

How cool is THAT?

I'm impressed

[the eric conspiracy (20178)]

They spelled liquifaction correctly.

Build - Debug - Analyze

[Thanshin (1188877)]

Finally, the CS way of developing is extending to other areas.

Soon architects will quickly make ten buildings without much previous study, then sell those who don't fall in the first two weeks with the promise that if some fall in the first five years, they'll release a v2.0 shaped as the ones still standing.

I can almost see the changelog:
"v1.5.1142 - The coming of winter discovered a weakness against rain in paper roof. New ice roof installed."

Re:

[geekoid (135745)]

what? That's not new to CS.

CS just does it faster and cheaper.

Er um, maybe not so much

[Ancient_Hacker (751168)]

Er, this looks really keen, but you have to consider the downside. Yes, there is a downside.

When fabricating chips, yes, you do want nice clean lines. Whopeee for clean lines. All hail clean lines. By coincidence, surface tension works towards cleaning up lines. Somebody should have patented surface tension. Too late now.

But eventually the nice clean lines end up at a transistor or resistor. There the rules are very different. You don't want surface tension to do its thing on the end of the line, which would be to shorten it. Very conveniently these nice pictures don't show what happens at the end of each line. How convenient.

Re:

[GanjaManja (946130)]

But also, the nice part of their process is that you can direct the lasers to certain areas of the chip.

I agree they should show the ends, but you could possibly use the directed laser pulse to stay away from the terminals.

Perfects defects too!

[goodmanj (234846)]

Hang on a second. A little random wiggling in a "wire" does no real harm -- it lengthens the path a little, maybe introduces a little more heating, but the electrons still go where they're supposed to.

The problem comes when the random wiggles cause two wires to touch, creating a short. Then you've got an actual dead chip.

But if this self-perfection thing works the way I think it does, it should cause that "bridge" to become stronger, just as two drops of water on a window merge when they touch.

Doesn't sou

Re:

[N1ck0 (803359)]

The issue is that in smaller conductor fabrication sizes the little wiggles do make a difference. The flaws in fabrication causes small variances in current and electrons to 'leak', this makes fabricating a 45nm chip so much harder then a 90nm chip. So by straightening the conductors you can make that 45nm chip easier to produce reliably, and also push the boundaries to make even smaller chips.

Having worked in manufacturing...

[Thelasko (1196535)]

I can tell you that reworking products takes three times as long, and therefore costs three times as much money, as doing it right the first time. This is because you have to build the defective product the first time, detect the defect, and repair the defect. The time and money spent on this research is better spent on getting the original manufacturing process under better control.

Don't blame me. Deming [wikipedia.org]said it first.

Re:

[fbjon (692006)]

AFAIK, in this case, getting the manufacturing process under better control implies getting the laws of physics under better control.

Re:

[Thelasko (1196535)]

See the "Seven Deadly Diseases [wikipedia.org]" section of the link I posted above.

4. Excuses, such as "Our problems are different."

Getting the laws of physics under control is part of any manufacturing process.

Re:

[fbjon (692006)]

The point is that you can't control the laws of physics, only understand and work around them.

Re:

[J.R. Random (801334)]

This isn't a matter of detecting defects and fixing them. It is a matter of applying a finishing step that improves the whole chip at once. You can be sure than chip manufacturers try very, very hard to get things right the first time. But if you read the article you would know that there are basic physical processes that make a certain amount of randomness and jagginess inevitable, which the laser process fixes.

Re:

[Thelasko (1196535)]

Yes, once again the summary was misleading.

Before -after, huh?

[Spy der Mann (805235)]

Now! From electronic researchers at the Princeton University, comes... Self-Perfection by Liquefaction! (public oohs)

Testimony: "I was a lousy CPU, i overheated and it was exhausting. But when I tried Self-Perfection by Liquefaction, my life changed".

(Shows picture of before / after)

(public wows and applauds)

And this perfection can only be yours by the mere price of ... not 1,000, not 500, not 100, but a mere $9.95!

CALL NOW!

Very Very Impressive

[by Anonymous Coward]

One of the major problems with getting linewidth (and thus line separation) down in the photoresist process is the problem of dielectric breakdown. Charge builds up at the irregular surface and if two points on different conductng lines are near one another they will arc across and the chip will be useless (same reason arc lamp electrodes are shaped as needles). This process seems to remove the irregularities, which should allow chip fab units to lay down pathways closer together. Note even the square spots get round(liquids form spheres to reduce surface area) which reduces the tendency for breakdown to occur. If nothing else could allow for the use of lower dielectric packaging, and make things cheaper.

Really cool.

Moore's Law is back?!

[ajs (35943)]

Moore's Law reminds me of Weird Al Yankovic. Every few years, someone proclaims that it's making a "comeback". The reality is, of course, that Moore's Law was never gone in the first place.

Re:

[DieByWire (744043)]

Is that image in actual size or what? 162*169? Very strange indeed.

The pictures show up larger in the linked article.

Re:

[bhima (46039)]

As I understand annealing it removes internal stresses created by uneven heating and cooling. This process smoothes etching or deposition defects.

Re:Annealing?

[by Anonymous Coward]

"Whatever made you ask this question?"
People generally ask questions to get answers. You, however, seem to ask questions to make other people feel stupid.

Re:

[maxume (22995)]

It gets hot and the defects get smoothed out.

I'm pretty sure that annealing changes the microstructure of a piece of metal (it doesn't change the form at a macro scale, but the internal structure changes), and the changes that this process makes seem to be occurring at a similar scale to recrystallization.

As far as why, I think it's interesting to look for parallels in the cutting edge of technology and ancient trade craft.

Here's what annealing does in glass.

[ahfoo (223186)]

One of my dozens of hobbyist hats is my glassworkers hat and annealing is a big deal in glasswork. From my experience with glass, I would say that annealing is probably the wrong term because this involves an actual deformation. Typically in annealing you want to stay below the point at which deformation occurs and your main concern is to create a gradual change in the temperature over time in order to eliminate internal stresses. So that's probably not the best word to use in this case since this is not about alleviating internal stresses but actual changes in the shape of the product.
     

Re:

[cowscows (103644)]

The article describes those blue lines as a quartz plate that sort of shapes the melted microchip parts. I think the blue strips in the one part of the diagram are more of a graphic simplification for visual clarity rather than a drawing meant to show an entirely realistic diagram of what is going on. I wouldn't think it particularly easy to make strips of quartz that tiny, not to mention properly align them over equally small transistors and stuff beneath.

But even if it is possible, maybe the techniques us