THE NEXT BIG THING Making Silicon Nanowires.... Military Meta Materials Measuring Tiniest of Structures Shining a Light on Cancer Amazing Metal Nanoclusters Studying Nanostructured Materials Improving Key Cancer Weapon Nanoscale Optical Structures The Nanoelectronic Future Microelectronics Fabrication Teaching Old Process New Tricks Nanobelts Join World of Ultra-small

Semiconductors are perhaps the most complex products ever manufactured in volume, each memory or processor chip requiring more than 400 precision steps.

Thanks to increasing miniaturization, each new chip generation packs more capability than the last. Decades ago, Intel founder Gordon Moore set forth the expectation that chip capacity would double every 18 months. Since then, continued gains have fueled dramatic growth in the information technology industry.

But Moore's Law now faces significant technical challenges – one of the most important arising from the wavelength of light.

Creating circuits on semiconductor wafers requires a painstaking lithography process. Patterns are produced in a photoresist material using light projected through a mask. Portions of the resist struck by the light become more soluble than the other regions and can be washed away. An etching step then forms the intricate circuitry patterns by removing underlying material not protected by the resist.

Making smaller and smaller devices means using shorter and shorter wavelengths of light. But with feature sizes approaching the nanometer-scale, these shorter wavelengths no longer penetrate through the entire resist layer, setting the stage for failure in the etching step. Ultimately, a whole new process will have to be devised.