Over the next generation of semiconductor technology 06 years into the 65nm Era

According to the international semiconductor technology roadmap ITRS, semiconductor technology into 90nm in 2004, 2006 into the 65nm era. Objectively, it should be recognized that, as of now, through the joint efforts of the global semiconductor industry, has overcome many difficulties, such as copper interconnects and low k dielectric materials, etc.. It seems that the progress of process technology has not been a drag on the progress of the industry, which is a breakthrough in immersion lithography. So the global semiconductor industry smoothly through 130nm, 90nm, began to enter the 65nm era.

Technology has been over 45nm

With the progress of the process, the length of the gate and the thickness of the insulation film will be reduced in two aspects, which can effectively reduce the area of the chip. For example, the production of a digital baseband IC using 65nm technology in the area of 1 mm2, integrated logic gates can be reached 900 thousand, the production of DRAM, each small unit size to only 0.028 square microns per square millimeter capacity can reach more than 20.0Mb.

Global semiconductor industry in 2006 to enter the 65nm era has been irreversible.

According to the latest news, Intel said recently will be ahead of the launch of a new architecture of 65nm process by Conroe desktop processor, is expected in the fourth quarter of 2006 to July 2006. The original plan in the second quarter of the launch of the BroadWater chipset (Series 965) will be postponed to the same time, in order to cope with the development of Conroe processors. At present, the typical development cycle of the processor is 24 ~ 32 months, while in the previous year is about 48 months. The main task of the research and development cycle is to find and locate the error, Intel in the production before any single error. The 65nm process took 20 months to reach the level of maturity, and for 180nm with the for the past 38 months, 130nm spent a month, and 90nm also spent a month.

Samsung has long been threatened to enter the production of 70nm DRAM products. The global industrial giants TSMC and UMC baseband processor in wireless communication applications (Baseband Processor), field programmable logic device (FPGA) and display chip and other products, is expected in the first half of 2006 also can enter the 65nm chip production, even Singapore franchise will start trial production into 65nm products in 2006 first quarter.

TI announced in December 12, 2005 that its 65nm process technology has passed certification, and will enter the production stage in 2006.

In addition, the franchise, IBM, Samsung Electronics in May 2005 has announced the establishment of a joint research and Development Alliance 90nm, and in June, once again put into the development of 65nm. Infineon also in November to join the alliance, 4 semiconductor industry cooperation each other respectively in the process and orders, including wireless communication and graphics chip 65nm, is expected to begin to enter the pilot production stage in the first quarter of 2006.

Among the many technical challenges, the difficulty of lithography is always in the first place. At present, the 193nm immersion lithography technology based on ArF is becoming more and more mature.

From all reports, the use of immersion lithography has been successfully through 45nm technology, the 32nm technology is the immersion lithography technology continue to develop large numerical aperture, or the use of EUV technology is still difficult to draw a conclusion.

In December 2005, SemiJapan and Cymer co hosted the seminar on how to achieve 32nm technology there are different views. Due to the current EUV technology, there are many basic research can not keep up. In the evaluation of EUV technology in 2004, there are three main difficulties that can not be overcome, that is, mask defects, photoresist sensitivity and light source power. Through the efforts of the 2005, the resolution of the photoresist and the roughness of the line have risen to the most important contradiction. Industry forecast EUV technology will be introduced into the market in 2009. If immersion ArF lithography is used, the two exposure must be used. The two exposure, will increase the cost and cycle. Therefore, from the point of view of accelerating the development of new products, put forward to support the application of EUV technology increasingly high voice.

As for the high k dielectric material, which is used to solve the leakage current of transistors, it is not possible to use 45nm in the process.

Post silicon Era

As the size of the traditional transistor is reduced, when there are only a few large molecules, there will be some strange quantum effects, which can not accurately determine the transistor "open" and "off" state. So the traditional transistor technology will eventually "die", instead of the technology may be nanotechnology and quantum devices etc..

Conventional transistors are formed by controlling the motion of a group of electrons, such as switching, oscillation and amplification, while a single electron transistor controls the motion of a single electron. The development of single electron transistor, as long as the control of an electronic behavior can be completed by a specific function, can reduce the power consumption to the original 1/1000, fundamentally solve the increasingly serious problem of integrated circuit power consumption.

However, as the electronic device, so far only use two of the electronic wave like particles. Secondly, a variety of traditional electronic components are controlled by the number of electronic signal processing. For example, the switching device is to control the flow of electronic circuits with or without the circuit, the amplifier is to control the number of electrons to complete the amplification function. The quantum device is not simply by controlling the number of electrons, but mainly by controlling the phase of electronic fluctuations to achieve a certain function. Therefore, quantum devices have higher response speed and lower power consumption.

Existing silicon (Si) and gallium arsenide (GaAs) devices