Computers are required to become more and more efficient. Inevitably, this involves greater demands on memory devices as well: they should be as small, strong, fast, and economical as possible – and always stay cool, if you please!
Only memory modules – known in technical terminology as DRAM – which outstrip their rivals in these areas, have any chance of a future career in PCs, laptops, mobile communications, the entertainment industry and the gigantic server parks of Internet service providers. The memory business generates a worldwide sales volume of 25 billion dollars a year.
The pressure to innovate is relentless, and only manufacturers with the best technologies and the most efficient production methods can survive. The world’s second-largest supplier in the hotly contested DRAM market is the Dresden-based chip manufacturer Qimonda. The new company, a wholly-owned Infineon subsidiary, currently produces memory components based on 90-nanometer technology, and is striving to be able to etch structures only 65 nanometers wide on the silicon wafers in the not-too-distant future.
Qimonda is supported by engineers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Ceramic Technologies and Systems IKTS in Dresden. The team of researchers led by Tobias Mayer-Uhma, Falko Schlenkrich and Ingolf Endler has developed a new etch-resistant film that will make it possible to produce deeper and narrower “trenches”, for it is this that makes the vital difference in memory chip production.
After a series of complex processing steps such as photolithography, etching and polishing, an etch-resistant silicon dioxide film, known as the “hard mask”, is applied. This film contains the structures into which the trenches are later etched using an etching gas. Subsequently filling up such a trench with dielectric material produces a capacitor. The deeper the trenches are etched, the more wall surface is available and the greater is the capacitance.
“We provide the technology for manufacturing and etching these masks,” explains Mayer-Uhma. In order to etch increasingly deep trenches, the Fraunhofer researchers are developing and testing more reactive gas mixtures along with correspondingly more robust mask materials. Masks made of aluminum nitride – which is five times more resistant to etching gas than silicon dioxide – are currently being tested at the team’s own modified vapor deposition facility.
Source: Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft
Related stories:
Pinpoint microwave resolution could lead to wireless power transfer
Researchers at the University of Michigan have focused microwaves to specks 20 times smaller than their wavelength and five times smaller than other devices have achieved.
Proposed 'Nanomechanical' Computer is Both Old-School and Cutting-Edge
A group of engineers have proposed a novel approach to computing: computers made of billionth-of-a-meter-sized mechanical elements. Their idea combines the modern field of nanoscience with the mechanical engineering principles used to design the earliest computers.
Toshiba Develops New NAND Flash Technology
Toshiba Corporation today announced a new three dimensional memory cell array structure that enhances cell density and data capacity without relying on advances in process technology, and with minimal increase in the chip die size. In the new structure, pillars of stacked memory elements pass vertically through multi-stacked layers of electrode material and utilize shared peripheral circuits. The innovative design is a potential candidate technology for meeting future demand for higher density NAND flash memory.
Nantero Announces Routine Use of Nanotubes in Production CMOS Fabs
Nantero, Inc., a nanotechnology company using carbon nanotubes for the development of next-generation semiconductor devices, has resolved all of the major obstacles that had been preventing carbon nanotubes from being used in mass production in semiconductor fabs. Nanotubes are widely acknowledged to hold great promise for the future of semiconductors, but most experts had predicted it would take a decade or two before they would become a viable material.
In new hybrid chip, molecules are memories
As scientists strive to satisfy the growing demand of the digital era for faster, smaller, and cheaper electronics, one of the most promising technologies is hybrids. Hybrid ICs (integrated circuits) consist of a combination of different technologies: micro, nano and molecular. Although currently scientists still face a handful of challenges in the development of hybrid ICs, the technique looks promising to produce the one of the highest memory densities yet – a whopping 100 billion bits per square centimeter.
Samsung Develops 3D Memory Package that Greatly Improves Performance Using Less Space
Samsung Electronics announced today that it has developed a small-footprint, wafer-level processed stack package (WSP) of high density memory chips using 'through silicon via' (TSV) interconnection technology. WSP actually reduces the physical size of a stacked set of semiconductor chips, while greatly improving overall performance. Widely seen as the next generation in package technologies, WSP can be applied to all types of hybrid packages, including memory and processors, to deliver higher speed and higher density with minimum use of chip space.
Magnetism shepherds microlenses to excavate 'nanocavities'
A Duke University engineer is "herding" tiny lenses with magnetic ferrofluids, precisely aligning them so that they focus bursts of light to excavate patterns of cavities on surfaces. Such photolithographically produced "nanocavities" -– each only billionths of a meter across – might serve as repositories for molecules engineered as chemical detectors, said Benjamin Yellen, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering and materials science at Duke's Pratt School of Engineering. Alternatively, he said, ringlike structures created via a similar technique might be useful for fabricating magnetic data storage elements.
Magnetic memory design breakthrough can lead to faster computers
Imagine a computer that doesn't lose data even in a sudden power outage, or a coin-sized hard drive that could store 100 or more movies. Magnetic random-access memory, or MRAM, could make these possible, and would also offer numerous other advantages. It would, for instance, operate at much faster than the speed of ordinary memory but consume 99 percent less energy.
