IBM, HP claim chipmaking breakthroughs

Stephen Withers
Friday, 04 May 2007 05:52

Your IT - Home IT

Hewlett-Packard has licensed its nanoimprint lithography technology - a method for stamping out chips instead of etching the patterns onto the silicon - to Nanolithosolutions. The latter company has developed a tool that allows the use of this technology with the mask aligners commonly employed in chip production.

"By building on HP's extensive research in nanoimprint lithography, we believe we have a tool that will enable reliable, repeatable processes for exploring biochips, photonics chips and many other applications," said Bo Pi, chief executive officer, Nanolithosolutions. "We believe this will be an extremely useful tool for academic and commercial users worldwide because it will be about a tenth the cost of current technology."

Pi's partner at Nanolithosolutions is Yong Chen, a former member of HP Labs. HP has an equity stake in the company.

"Because HP and other companies need unique tools to conduct nanoscale research and development, we created the underlying technology that makes this tool possible," said Stan Williams, HP senior fellow and director, quantum science research, HP Labs. "But we rely on innovative companies like Nanolithosolutions to do the additional engineering necessary to make user-friendly tools commercially available. This will help create future generations of chips that will go beyond the capabilities of today's fabrication technologies at an affordable cost."

Nanoimprint lithography allows the fabrication of 15nm chips - much finer than the 45nm process used in chips shipping this year. While the moulds are difficult to produce, chip manufacture using the technology is straightforward.

HP has been developing nanoimprint lithography for a decade, and some of its advances such as the crossbar latch (a molecular-scale device that can take the place of transistors in microprocessors and memory chips) were produced using the technology.