Practical Chip Design

The news this morning that Hitachi is to collaborate with IBM on device research for the 32 nm node and beyond might have raised a few eyebrows. Setting aside, as the press release did, the age-old animosity stemming from a bitter and protracted mainframe patent dispute decades ago, the question still lingers. Hitachi? Didn’t they get out of the semiconductor business?

IBM Systems & Technology Group CTO Bernie Meyerson is quick to correct that impression. “They backed away from semiconductor manufacturing, but Hitachi continues to do stunning work in semiconductor fundamentals,” Meyerson says. This work appears to be happening in at least two locations: Hitachi central research, where the company continues to build its understanding of semiconductor physics; and subsidiary Hitachi High-Technologies, which has a line of commercial electron-microscope, focused ion beam, and micromanipulator systems essential to deep sub-micron metrology.

Meyerson contrasted this expertise to the nano-scale expertise within IBM. IBM scientists, he pointed out, have won Nobel Prizes for work in manipulation of single atoms on the surface of a semiconductor. Hitachi High-Technologies brings expertise in wide-field measurement, characterization, and analysis of structures that can be as small as 5-10 atoms across. Hitachi High-Tech’s scanning electron microscopes, for instance, can examine the details of patterns created by extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography.

Meyerson says that IBM already has some specific programs in mind for collaboration with Hitachi at the Albany Nanoelectronics center. Not by coincidence, this is the location of one of the worlds two ASML EUV lithography Alpha systems, and the location of much of IBM’s work in advanced processes. It is also the site of what Meyerson claims is probably the only end-to-end 32 nm pilot manufacturing line in the world.