Monday, March 10, 2008
IBM invites Hitachi into its ecosystem for 32 nm
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.
In that environment, the relationship can be pretty open-ended. As Meyerson says, the work of 32 nm process development will continuously create structures, features, and interfaces that are only a handful of atoms across, are complex, and are as yet poorly understood. There is nothing in this region that is accessible to an optical microscope or a conventional chemical analysis lab. But the ability to see, measure, and analyze these nanostructures will be crucial to all process development efforts to come. It could be a fruitful relationship.© Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.