CHIPS &
NANOTECHNOLOGY
http://www.intel.com/corporate/education/emea/irc/goals.htm
Vaishali
Kochavara
Kanika
Singh
Charles
Hashem
Mingee
Hong
Corey
Kelkenberg
How chips are made
1.Thermal Oxidation
2. Patterning
3. Etching
4. Doping
5. Final step
http://www.appliedmaterials.com/investors/annual_report_1999/how_chips_are_made.html
http://www.sematech.org/corporate/news/mfgproc/mfgproc.htm#steps1_2
Thermal Oxidation
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Silicon Wafer
chip making base on the
silicon wafer. This can be
made from large, cylindrical
silicon crystals. Polishing it,
and start chip making
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Epitaxial Silicon
for enhancing chip making,
extremely pure silicon crystal
layer grown on some wafers
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Dielectric Deposition
Using Chemical Vapor Deposition (CVD) technology,
an insulating material called dielectric is deposited on
the wafer surface, being grown and deposited in later
steps
Patterning
http://www.appliedmaterials.com/investors/annual_report_1999/how_chips_are_made.html
http://www.sematech.org/corporate/news/mfgproc/mfgproc.htm#steps1_2
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Photolithography
Photo lithography is process used to make
multiple layers of circuit pattern on the chip.
wafer surface is deposited a light-sensitive
chemical. It is repeated many times as each
layer of the chip is built.
Reticle Inspection
systems help ensure that the image of the
circuit pattern used by the photolithography
system is defect-free.
Etching
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Etching
removes selected material from the chip surface to
create the device structures.
http://www.appliedmaterials.com/investors/annual_report_1999/how_chips_are_made.html
http://www.sematech.org/corporate/news/mfgproc/mfgproc.htm#steps1_2
Doping
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Ion Implantation
shoots section of silicon with charged atoms
accelerates “dopant” materials to a high
velocity and shoots section of silicon and
change the conductivity of the film.
Rapid Thermal Processing (RTP)
subjects the wafer to a very brief, intense burst of
heat that can go from room temperature to
1000°C in seconds. This technology is used to
change the characteristics of the deposited film.
Final Step
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Final Chip
After processing, the chip is covered with a
plastic or ceramic material to seal it tightly
from the atmosphere.
http://www.appliedmaterials.com/investors/annual_report_1999/how_chips_are_made.html
http://www.sematech.org/corporate/news/mfgproc/mfgproc.htm#steps1_2
Moore’s Law – An Industry Driver
Moore’s Law - Background
-Gordon E. Moore, Co-Founder of Intel.
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Law:
-Moore’s Law deals with the growth of integrated circuits,
primarily transistors, with a respect to minimum
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component cost.
-According to Moore’s Law the complexity of and
integrated circuit will double about every 18 months but
will cost the same to produce as the earlier model.
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Moore’s Law - Challenges
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Moore’s Law faces many challenges put forth by the
onset of nano-scale processing
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Challenges include:
– Transistors will soon be reaching the size of single
atoms, a fundamental barrier that will be hard to
overcome.
– Thermal design needed to effectively handle the
massive amount of dissipated power as chips
become more and more powerful
– The ability to fabricate gate terminals on single
atom sized transistors that are still able to control
the ON/OFF behavior of a chip.
– Be able to solve all of these challenges WHILE
reducing the overall cost of the entire system.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moores_law
Moore’s Law began as just an observation or an educated
guess, but as time went on and the original predictions turned
into reality, Moore’s Law became the “target” of semiconductor
and chip manufacturers.
These manufacturers believed that their competitors would be
able to make the technological advances predicted by Moore so
they set their goals accordingly.
This proved to be a monumental engineering task, but Moore’s
Law has held up since 1965
It may not hold up for long though due to some fundamental
Challenges.
Intel chip specifications – Pentium/MMX (circa 1993) to Pentium D “EE” (circa 2006)
Source: http://www.tomshardware.com/2005/11/21/the_mother_of_all_cpu_charts_2005/page21.html
The Growth of Moore’s Law
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As more and more transistors are put onto a
chip, as a chip gains more cores, larger cache
sizes, and faster bus speeds, resulting in more
calculations/second.
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100Ghz – Chips are NOT possible.
– Moore’s Law is not based on chip
operating frequencies, it is instead based
on how much useful date can be
calculated per second and how can we
make this chip at the lowest possible
price. We can expect 5ghz.
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Moore’s Law will live on.
– In the form of [(Processing
Power)/Second]/Cost. Meaning that chip
core speeds will slow down, but the
amount of useful data that a chip can
calculate per second for a certain
minimum “cost” will continue to increase
in accordance to Moore’s Law.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moores_law
The Future of Moore’s Law
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As of Q1 of 2006 chip design
manufacturers (AMD, INTEL, APPLE)
have mass-produced chips on the
90nm scale in 64 bit, dual core, and 64
bit dual core.
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Following the general trend of Moore’s
Law a few of the companies (Intel,
AMD) have begun to produce multiple
cored, 64 bit chips, on the 65 nm scale
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These companies are expected to
come out with chips on the 45, 30, and
possibly even smaller chip sizes in
accordance with Moore’s Law.
Intel is overcoming challenges!
To meet the challenge of power loss Intel has been advancing a variety of novel
power-saving techniques:
• New process technologies, such as 65 nanometer (nm)
• New transistor structures and materials, including strained silicon, tri-gate
transistors
• Innovative approaches to circuit and micro architecture design
• New multi-core architectures
• Advanced packaging materials
• Improvements to system components
• Software optimization techniques
Bias : By dynamically adjusting the voltage
applied to the body of a transistor (bias), one
can manipulate the threshold voltage—the
voltage at which the transistor turns on.
Having localized control of the bias voltage
enables the designer to make tradeoffs
between the circuit performance and power it
consumes. This capability can be used to
reduce leakage during periods of inactivity
or to increase performance during peak use.
Dynamic Sleep Transistor is another innovative
Intel technique that involves adding a transistor in
series with the power supply that can be turned
off when a block of logic circuitry is in idle
mode, thus reducing leakage.
http://www.intel.com/technology/silicon/power/chipdesign.htm
http://www.intel.com/technology/silicon/power/index.htm
THE 65NM CHIP
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Intel's 65-nanometer (nm) process technology is the world's most
advanced chip-manufacturing technology, and will enable future chips
with increased capabilities and performance. Intel is at least a year
ahead of the rest of the industry in shipping products based on 65nm
process technology, in volume. The 65nm process features leading-edge
transistor technology, unmatched by competition.
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Their leading-edge transistor technologies include:
Second generation strained silicon with 10-15 percent improved drive
current for improved performance
1.2nm gate oxide and 35nm gates for improved performance
NiSi for low resistance cap on gates and source-drains
Lower interconnect capacitance through low-k carbon doped oxide
dielectric and 0.7x line length scaling providing increased performance
and lower power
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Intel has initiated commercial production and revenue shipments of
dual-core microprocessors based on the 65nm process technology on
300mm wafers, which enables cost-effective, high-volume
manufacturing of multi-core microprocessors and other advanced
products. Intel's 65nm technology roughly doubles transistor density
compared to the 90nm chip.
http://www.intel.com/technology/silicon/65nm_technology.htm
http://www.intel.com/technology/silicon/si08042.htm
More on 65 nm chip
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Intel has integrated power saving features into the 65nm process
technology which are critical to delivering power-efficient
computing and communications products. Intel's 65nm transistors
have a reduced gate length of 35 nm and a gate oxide thickness of
1.2 nm, which combine to provide improved performance and
reduced gate capacitance. The reduced gate capacitance ultimately
lowers a chip's active power. The new process also integrates eight
copper interconnect layers and uses a "low-k" dielectric material
that increases the signal speed inside the chip and reduces chip
power consumption.
• Sleep transistors" implemented in the 65nm SRAM shut off the current flow to large
blocks of the SRAM when they are not being utilized, eliminating a significant source
of power consumption on a chip. This is especially beneficial for battery-powered
devices, like laptops. In addition, Intel now has an ultra-low-power 65nm process
technology under development that will deliver power savings on mobile platforms and
small-form-factor devices. This process addresses three types of transistor leakage:
sub-threshold leakage, junction leakage and gate oxide leakage. The result is that the
total leakage is reduced by roughly 1000 times from Intel's standard process while
maintaining about 50 percent of the drive current. The benefits of reduced transistor
leakage are lower power and increased battery life.
http://www.intel.com/technology/silicon/si08042.htm
http://www.intel.com/technology/silicon/65nm_technology.htm
45 NM CHIP- expected in 2007
Intel has produced what are believed to be the industry's first
fully functional static random access memory (SRAM) chips
using 45-nanometer (nm) process technology, in accordance
with Moore’s Law. The 45nm process enables chip circuitry
with higher performance-per-watt than the most advanced
processes in production today. In the future, using the 45nm
process will allow us to make chips with twice as many
transistors in a given area. Intel's 45nm process technology will
allow more energy efficient chips for mobile devices and
increased opportunities for building smaller, more-powerful
platforms. Part of the reason for this is, in comparison to the
65nm process, the new technology will provide twice the
transistor density for smaller chips or increased transistor count
& there will be a 20% improvement in transistor switching
speed with a five-fold reduction in transistor current leakage
benefiting battery life for mobile devices, making it possible to
build smaller chips, thus smaller, more-powerful products. The
45nm SRAM chip has more than 1 billion transistors.
32 nm chip—expected in 2009
There is research going on also for the development of 32 nm sized chips.
Intel plans to use extreme ultra-violet (EUV) lithography in the future
which uses a series of mirrors to direct light with a wavelength of 13.5 nm
to print exceptionally small features—elements as small as 32 nm and
beyond.
http://www.intel.com/pressroom/archive/releases/20060125comp.htm
http://www.intel.com/technology/silicon/new_45nm_silicon.htm
http://www.intel.com/technology/silicon/65nm_technology.htm