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

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

What am I looking at?

read the article

here is a larger version [princeton.edu]

Re:read the article

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:

maybe they wanted to save the host some bandwidth.

Sharks

Where do the frikin' sharks come in to it?

Re:Sharks

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

Re:

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

Corrected picture link

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

Better Before and After

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

Not really fixing...

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

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

For instance, death rays.

Re:Anonymous Coward

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

Popcorn?

Fake !!!

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

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 :)

I'm impressed

They spelled liquifaction correctly.

Build - Debug - Analyze

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."

Er um, maybe not so much

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.

Very Very Impressive

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.

Re:

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

Re:Annealing?

"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:

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

Here's what annealing does in glass.

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:Misleading title?

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:Misleading title?

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.

Re:

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