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Leibson's Law

Steve LeibsonLeibson's Law: It takes 10 years for any disruptive technology to become pervasive in the design community. This blog is about the disruptive technologies that either have or will win over electronic engineers, some that won't, and why. Please feel free to link to these blog entries! Written by Steve Leibson, a marketing consultant specializing in lead generation and content creation for high-tech companies, former VP of Content for Reed Business, and former Editor in Chief of EDN. See my consulting Web site at www.sleibson.com and my history site at www.hp9825.com. You can email me at steven.leibson followed by the magic email symbol @ followed by att.net.

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Thursday, May 3, 2007

IBM air-gap dielectric literally full of holes

May 3 2007 9:20AM | Permalink |Comments (5) |


IBM researchers have announced that they’ve found a way to use vacuum as the insulator on nanometer ICs. A self-assembling, nanotech polymer forms a hole-filled foam around the on-chip wiring. The nanotech involved mimics the structures nature uses to build seashells, snowflakes, and tooth enamel. The resulting structures have 20nm feature sizes and are much smaller than current photolithographic techniques can produce, which is why the nanotech is invoked.

Vacuum has a dielectric constant of 1. As low as you can go. According to IBM, the resulting vacuum insulation boosts chip speed by 35% or reduces energy consumption by 15%. Your choice. There’s the usual boilerplate about how this technique extends Moore’s Law in the press release too.

Note that air-gap construction isn’t new. GaAs chip vendors used it to produce fast chips back in the 1970s and 1980s, but the process was too expensive to use except for gold-plated military ICs. The new IBM process shoehorns well into existing CMOS fab lines. IBM’s use of nanotech gives this chip-construction technique another lease on life—IBM plans to use the fabrication technique for production chips in 2009. (More coverage on EDN's site here.).

 

Chip made with IBM’s nanotech air-gap technology

Reader Comments



at 5/3/2007 6:22:55 PM, C. Teague said:
How does this fare at 30GHz? We have applications that are going to 50 and 100 Ghz.



at 5/3/2007 8:29:36 PM, Luhaponte said:
Who cares if it goes 30Ghz or not? This replaces stereolithography by self assembly, to me that is the biggest news in last 20 years.




at 5/4/2007 5:44:23 AM, Pete G. said:
I agree with Luhaponte. This is a game changing development in the search for better semiconductor design/manufacturing technologies. It also has big implications for energy conservation in all electronic devices.



at 5/4/2007 5:49:29 PM, chyao said:
what about the reliability issues for this type of inteconnects full of pre-existing voids and mechanically weakened dielectrics ?



at 5/8/2007 5:48:13 PM, r said:
This is nothing more than super hype. Air gaps are around for a long time. Nobody seriously considered them due to all sorts of manufacturability issues. T

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