materialsscienceandengineering:
New chip fabrication approach
Depositing different materials within a single chip layer could lead to more efficient computers.
Today, computer chips are built by stacking layers of different materials and etching patterns into them.
But in the latest issue of Advanced Materials, MIT researchers and their colleagues report the first chip-fabrication technique that enables significantly different materials to be deposited in the same layer. They also report that, using the technique, they have built chips with working versions of all the circuit components necessary to produce a general-purpose computer.
The layers of material in the researchers’ experimental chip are extremely thin — between one and three atoms thick. Consequently, this work could abet efforts to manufacture thin, flexible, transparent computing devices, which could be laminated onto other materials. “The methodology is universal for many kinds of structures,” says Xi Ling, a postdoc in the Research Laboratory of Electronics and one of the paper’s first authors. “This offers us tremendous potential with numerous candidate materials for ultrathin circuit design.”
The technique also has implications for the development of the ultralow-power, high-speed computing devices known as tunneling transistors and, potentially, for the integration of optical components into computer chips.
Is this our next processor breakthrough?
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