Subject: [NEXTEL-1] Teensy RIT microchip technology attracts vast company interest

From: Marcelrf <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 05 Apr 2004 13:52:37 -0400

http://democratandchronicle.com/biznews/0403FA3QGAC_business.shtml

By Richard Mullins
Staff Writer
	
CARLOS ORTIZ staff photographer
Process engineer Emil Piscani inspects a silicon wafer that has been 
immersed in water on Thursday at Rochester Institute of Technology. RIT
has 
developed this technique for making radically faster and smaller 
microchips. [Day in Photos]

(April 3, 2004) — Some of the world’s best known technology companies
are 
focused on a significant new discovery by Rochester Institute of
Technology 
researchers.

Engineers from IBM Corp., Motorola Inc., Intel Corp. and other firms are 
now visiting the Henrietta campus to explore the discovery, a technique
for 
making radically faster and smaller microchips, which are essentially
the 
brains of any computer.

The technique involves submerging parts of the chip-making process 
underwater. It could hasten development of faster and cheaper computers, 
with the first commercial uses in a few years, said Bruce Smith,
director 
of RIT’s Center for Nanolithography, who led the team that developed the 
methods.

”This is the same process that you see when you look at something 
underwater, and everything looks shifted and different,” Smith said. “We 
use that same property to make smaller microchips.”

If commercially successful, RIT could see a financial benefit through 
several patents on the new technology.

”We’re always looking at the next generation of methods,” said Jeff
Meute, 
an engineer at IBM currently working at SEMATECH, a consortium of
computer 
chip makers that conducts research into common problems. “We’re very 
interested in this work at RIT. … You’re always trying to get more 
aggressive with what you can put on microchips.”

The discovery leapfrogs a daunting challenge for chip makers. Faster 
computers or larger memory banks require more powerful microchips, and
the 
easiest way to boost a chip’s power is to pack more circuits into a
smaller 
space.

”Eventually you’re going to hit a brick wall because you can’t go any 
smaller,” Smith said. “The end of that road had been predicted for just
a 
few years out, and the only alternatives were highly exotic approaches
that 
used X-rays and such. What we are able to do here at RIT is extend the
life 
of current methods out past 2010.”

That could radically increase the speed of new microchips and help major 
chip-making companies avoid spending billions of dollars to remake their 
factories, Smith said.

Typically, microchips are made by shining the image of a circuit onto a
bed 
of silicon, etching the pathways that eventually control devices such as 
computers and cell phones.

The new technique draws on a long-known property of water to bend light, 
similar to how a pencil appears bent if dipped into a glass of water. By 
immersing a silicon wafer in water, Smith found that images beamed onto
the 
wafer naturally shrink in size — far more than in air alone.

The idea drew on a discovery made more than 100 years ago by a German 
physicist who found that placing a drop of oil on a sample under a 
microscope made the sample’s image suddenly appear far larger.

Smith considered reversing the process and proposed the approach in
2000.

”Major companies basically told us ‘Good luck. Work on it. Maybe we’ll
hire 
some of your students if the tests work,’” Smith said. Eighteen months 
later, Smith’s team used the new method to make circuits 10 times
smaller 
than the best methods currently available, with individual lines
1/2000th 
the width of a human hair.

That discovery attracted the attention of major chip makers, which
scaled 
back much of their own collaborative research into underwater techniques 
and asked RIT to take over the work. “Everyone suddenly decided this was 
the way to go,” Smith said. The breakneck pace of new products was a
major 
motivation, said Stewart Robertson, an engineer with the microchip 
materials company Rohm and Haas Electronic Materials in Marlboro, Mass., 
which contributed to the research effort.

Thumb-sized memory drives for personal computers, for example, were 
doubling in capacity to hundreds of megabytes of space for less than
$100. 
“The pace of this research was suddenly so fast that companies who
normally 
were competitors were suddenly collaborating on this work at RIT,” 
Robertson said.

RIT’s next step, Smith said, is to work closely with chip-makers on how
to 
move the technology from the lab into the marketplace. The school plans
to 
train its current students in the new techniques and to hold a series of 
seminars and training sessions for firms such as IBM and Intel.

The first prototypes are already operational in RIT’s labs, partly
through 
the cooperation of companies such as Rohm, plus lens-maker Corning
Tropel 
and British firm Exitech, which manufactures chip-making machines.

Corning Tropel has already benefited from the work, providing equipment
to 
RIT and lining up potential customers.

”This is really a new technology vehicle for us,” said Louie Denes,
manager 
of marketing and sales for Corning Tropel.

[email-masked]

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