Who Will Fund Development?

Why is it even necessary?

The economic reality is that no-one will build a new "fab" unless there are customers. If people want tiny gadgets badly enough, they'll pay outrageous prices for them, and that's what funds the new fabs. (Think iPhone.)

Hi,

everybody expects a limit to this growth but nobody can predict this.

As the diameter of the wafers reached 100mm or 4" there was a rumor that the flexibility will increase too much with the next step to 150mm - as the thickness is held constant the compliance is rising with the third power of the diameter.

This problem caused later the chnage from horizontal wafer orientation during transport and processing to vertical.

Then there was the rumor about the slicing of the raw silicon ingots (coming from vacuum crystallisation) a very expensive material (from 500 to 15,000$/kg depending on purity) that this slicing could no longer be done with the inner diameter diamond saw because the total machine being no longer possible with adequate cost and risc.

The answer was the wire-saw where a twisted steel wire (100 in parallel) is used in a lapping process with siliconcarbide to cut the silicon.

The next step was the one-side-grinder switched to simultaneous two-side-grinding.

In parallel the step and repeat cameras were growing in size and in quality to expand the limits of classical optics, now using deep UV-light to expose and next going to vacuum UV still imagable with calciumfluoride lenses, next going to all reflecting optics as x-rays will be used for exposure.

This is stream of miracles made reality by engineers!!!

But: for shure there will be a limit. May be we reach this limit with the todays or tomorrows next generation of equipment.

Do you have suggestions which part of the pocess chain will be the limiting link?

RHABE

I'm betting that the limit will be the wires. As wires get skinnier, resistance and capacitance don't scale along. Transistors get faster as they get smaller, but the wire effects overwhelm that, so things actually get slower. (Details available on request.)

However, we can get around this by building in layers. 3D-ICs can make chips faster and smaller without shrinking the wires. (Again, I have details if you want 'em.)