Dan's Biz Bookshelf: 'Getting Naked: A Business Fable'
The Chemical Connection: Common Misconceptions in Wet Processing
It’s Only Common Sense: Selling to Engineers
Farming at Nanoscale Dimensions
March 17, 2016 | IBMEstimated reading time: 5 minutes
Building transistors today is done with lithography, which is a “top-down” process that uses patterning to create the complex layers that make up the transistor structure. It’s a bit like exposing a negative on photographic paper to get the pattern you want and then using this pattern as a template to place each material – metal, insulator or semiconductor – in exactly the right location. This process has worked successfully since the 1950s, and our scientists have even demonstrated the first working test chips with features approaching 7 nanometers, the equivalent of placing more than 20 billion tiny switches on chips the size of a fingernail. But as we get to ever-smaller dimensions, new approaches to building nanoscale devices will be required.
At IBM’s T. J. Watson Research Center we use a technique called self-assembly to grow and directly control nanostructures that could one day form parts of integrated circuits. Self-assembly looks at chip building from the other end of the spectrum: a “bottom-up” approach that builds nanostructures in a way that is dictated by physics rather than by an imposed pattern. In some ways it’s like farming, in that that you plant seeds to grow a crop, and then support the growth with the right conditions to get the result you want.
But exploring self-assembly doesn’t mean we are ready to throw away today’s approach; instead, we want to use top-down strategies that we have already learned over many years, and combine them with new tricks that use self-assembly.
Think of water splashing onto a pane of glass. It spontaneously forms little hemispheres. The droplets are hemispherical because surface tension pulls the water molecules into this shape to minimize the surface area and energy of each droplet. But there is no reason for the droplets to form in any particular location or to be any particular size, so their positions and sizes are random. The spontaneous formation of the hemispherical shape is an example of self-assembly, but other aspects of the process (position, size) are not controlled.
Now imagine there is a scratch on the glass. Water droplets form on the scratch, because it is a good, low energy place for the water molecules to stick. We have now combined self-assembly – “make a hemispherical droplet on this surface” – with an imposed pattern – “make a droplet on this part of the surface by using carefully placed scratches.” The result is that we can build more complicated patterns. Flexible, customized patterns like this water example, but on the nanoscale, help us build integrated circuits.
Now imagine there is a scratch on the glass. Water droplets form on the scratch, because it is a good, low energy place for the water molecules to stick. We have now combined self-assembly – “make a hemispherical droplet on this surface” – with an imposed pattern – “make a droplet on this part of the surface by using carefully placed scratches.” The result is that we can build more complicated patterns. Flexible, customized patterns like this water example, but on the nanoscale, help us build integrated circuits.
The more precisely we can direct this self-assembly, the more versatility we can achieve. We can choose different materials for our nanostructures, build them with different sizes, and control their chemical compositions in ways that allow them to be tuned to have the properties we need. The properties of some nanomaterials could include the ability to do the job of a transistor but with less power, or at extreme temperatures beyond what silicon can handle.
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