IBM, HP claim chipmaking breakthroughs

Stephen Withers
Friday, 04 May 2007 05:52

Your IT - Home IT

IBM and Hewlett-Packard have both announced breakthroughs that could bring significant changes to chip manufacturing.

IBM has developed a self-assembing nanotechnology to create vacuum insulating gaps between conductors on integrated circuits. The result is a 35 percent speed increase and a 15 percent reduction in energy consumption.

Conventional chips are made by photolithography, which involves shining light through a mask onto a photosensitive material coating the silicon wafer, chemically etching the pattern into the silicon and then depositing other materials.

The new process involves coating the silicon with a mix of compounds that when baked organise into a uniform structure containing vacuum holes 20nm across and separating the chip's conductors. 

The technique has now been proved in IBM's commercial manufacturing line in East Fishkill, New York, to build experimental versions of the POWER6 processor. It will be used in production chips in 2009.

"This is the first time anyone has proven the ability to synthesize mass quantities of these self-assembled polymers and integrate them into an existing manufacturing process with great yield results," said Dan Edelstein, IBM Fellow and chief scientist of the self-assembly airgap project.

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