Media celebrate IBM’s new chip, but what happens next?
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.8126
In April, the 50th anniversary of Moore’s law occasioned widespread media celebration and expressions of hope for the further prospects of the information age. Now the media are widely celebrating a claimed new advance: IBM’s new ultradense 7-nanometer chip. On the evening of 9 July, the Google News search term “IBM chip” yielded fewer than 100 000 hits. But by the morning of 10 July, it was yielding almost 500 000. Three hours later, it yielded “about 2,050,000.” What’s mostly not in the news, though—not even for the new prototype itself—is much about the physics-and-engineering question of how to continue extending the benefits of Moore’s law at industrial scale.
The Wall Street Journal reported that IBM has “developed test chips with much smaller circuitry than products now on the market, pushing ahead of rivals in the perennial race to pack more tiny transistors on squares of silicon.” The article noted that the prototypes “rely on a long-awaited breed of new production tools” and that there’s no certainty about high-volume production practicality. Nevertheless, declared the WSJ, “the developments could help IBM and its manufacturing partners pressure competitors like Intel Corp., while signaling that the industry can continue to overcome obstacles in boosting the speed, data storage capacity and power consumption of future chips.”
Great! But wait: How?
From among those Google hits, a sampling of articles suggests that most major media organizations give the non-answer seen in the Guardian article ‘s final line: “The next jump beyond 7 nm will likely require all-new materials and manufacturing techniques, if it is at all possible.” That’s echoed in a passage from the New York Times’s article :
The company said on Thursday that it had working samples of chips with seven-nanometer transistors. It made the research advance by using silicon-germanium instead of pure silicon in key regions of the molecular-size switches.
The new material makes possible faster transistor switching and lower power requirements. The tiny size of these transistors suggests that further advances will require new materials and new manufacturing techniques.
The Times emphasizes that the “semiconductor industry must now decide if IBM’s bet on silicon-germanium is the best way forward” and that it “must also grapple with the shift to using extreme ultraviolet, or EUV, light to etch patterns on chips at a resolution that approaches the diameter of individual atoms.” At the end, the Times quotes Mukesh Khare, vice president for semiconductor research at IBM: “EUV is another game changer.”
Khare himself wrote in a 9 July online posting:
We have employed a new type of lithography in the chip-making process, Extreme Ultraviolet, or EUV, which delivers order-of-magnitude improvements over today’s mainstream optical lithography. All told, we’ve made dozens of design and tooling improvements. It has been a massive effort requiring multiple breakthroughs in science, technology and chip architectures and manufacturing processes.
Looking ahead, there’s no clear path to extend the life of the silicon semiconductor further into the future. The next major wave of progress, the 5 nm node, will be even more challenging than the 7 nm node has been.
According to the Times, IBM has been working with an international consortium and “is investing $3 billion in a private-public partnership with New York State, GlobalFoundries, Samsung and equipment vendors.”
GlobalFoundries? That’s the affiliation of the four coauthors of MIT’s William Barletta on the new paper “Considerations for a free-electron laser-based extreme-ultraviolet lithography program.” Are free-electron lasers (FELs) a possible answer to the question of what’s next?
Barletta and colleagues think so. They assert that an FEL “offers a cost effective, single-source alternative for powering an entire EUV lithography program” and that “FEL integration into semiconductor fab architecture will require both unique facility considerations as well as a paradigm shift in lithography operations.” Barletta chairs the board of the US Particle Accelerator School , centered at Fermilab. The paper addresses the underlying electron-accelerator considerations of injection, energy recovery, multi-turn acceleration, and RF systems. It presents “FEL development and deployment roadmaps … focusing on manufacturer deployment for the 5 nm or 3 nm technology nodes.”
Whether FELs are actually suitable for next production steps in what some have called Moore’s era is well beyond the scope and capacities of this reporting venue, which is about media, albeit science in the media. But the possibility isn’t beyond the capacities of reporters on science itself. Maybe some of them will take it up.
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Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.