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Electron microscopy shows ‘mouse bite’ defects in semiconductors
- loopback_device 7mo agoOriginal article: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-026-69733-1 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-026-69733-1
- 0xDEFACED 7mo agoany hope that this could be applied to improving memory fab yields and ease some of the capacity constraints on consumer devices? asking for a friend
- lovich 7mo agoLess likely than just inducing more demand from the AI firms
- Joel_Mckay 7mo agoSilicon has 23 known isotopes, and now you why it will unlikely ever be economical to reach 0 defects in a business context. Modern chip designs do include over-provisioned features, so designers can often selectively downgrade areas that are not viable. Chenming Hu books about solar cell physics and semiconductors are quite accessible. =3
- adrian_b 7mo agoFor now, this is useful only for the processes used to make the latest CPUs, like Intel Panther Lake and Clearwater Forest in the 18A process and various CPUs for smartphones or computers that have been launched recently or which will be launched around the end of the year and which are made with the TSMC 2 nm process. Memories use more mature fabrication processes, for which it is likely that electron microscopy already worked well enough. The article is about a better method for processing the output of an electron microscope, which enables a better image resolution than in the past and the 3D reconstruction of the surface of the device. This is needed for the 2 nm/18A processes and their successors, for which the existing tools were insufficient.
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- kibibu 7mo ago> At Bell Labs, Muller and fellow scientist Glen Wilk ’90, who is now vice president of technology at ASM, tried replacing silicon dioxide - the prevailing gate material, which leaked too much current at small scales – with hafnium oxide. They are naming professors like "Now That's What I Call Music" albums now? (I genuinely can't find why there's a '90 there, suspect it's a copy/paste error?)
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- bsder 7mo agoPresumably because he is a Cornell alumnus from 1990. The article is at cornell.edu .
- kibibu 7mo agoAhh makes a lot of sense
- userbinator 7mo agoI first thought it was supposed to be a comma, and that he's 90 years old.
- eichin 7mo agoListing alumni degree year is generally an "insider" thing (noone who isn't also a Cornell alum really cares which year, especially for a bachelor's degree; likewise Cornell doesn't mention the Harvard '95 PhD in Applied Physics, even if it's probably more relevant to the work...)
- metalman 7mo ago"insider" thing, you can be certain that an exempliary mind such as his did not get fired up in a vacume, and that 90, was a year and place that likely produced an iteresting mixed bag of characters, or in other times would be refered to as "schools of thought", and then some went off to bell labs which still functions as an intelectual singuarity that leaks concepts through it's event horison ocasionaly, or in this case displays time dialation effects.
- bob1029 7mo agoMetrology is probably the most important part of semiconductor manufacturing aside from actually putting features on the wafer. Statistical process control is at the heart of profitability, and measurement of what we've actually built is how it gets its data. If the accuracy and frequency of measurement goes up, the control loop tightens accordingly. Parameterizing features and defects is a really interesting multidisciplinary process. Figuring out how to correlate defects at EDS time with something that occurred 80 process steps ago is where all the money lives in the business. Once you draw the correlation, you can place it under SPC and people will automatically get paged in the middle of the night the moment something starts to drift into an unhappy range.
- chuckadams 7mo agoPut out some really tiny mousetraps then?
- artemonster 7mo agoNew proc step : Cheese Vapor Deposition
- ta988 7mo agoI want that on my waffler
- Benjami71506444 7mo ago[dead]
- fleshmonad 7mo agoHe needs mouse bites to live
- alphawhisky 7mo agoThis vexes me.
- sodality2 7mo agoI too am in this episode.
- nDRDY 7mo agoAnd people wonder why I laugh when they say "non-mechanical devices are more reliable." Sure mechanical devices need pieces to stay moving in the same way over and over again, but electronic devices need a huge number of very precisely-placed atoms to not move in any way, including chemically.
- treesknees 7mo agoIn what context are people saying this? I’ve never heard anyone proclaim that electronic devices are more reliable than mechanical devices. See for example how people desire cars with “no computers”.
- pvdebbe 7mo agoTimepieces are a classic example of this.
- Xylakant 7mo agoThe problem is not that modern cars are somehow less reliable than old cars. They are much more reliable. But they’re also much less repairable without specialized equipment. You can with somewhat accessible technology repair almost all defects on a purely mechanical car. You cannot do the same for a modern car unless you happen to have a chip fab.
- lazide 7mo agoFor a given feature set. Anyone that has had to deal with a carbureted engine, or old school hydraulic ‘computer’ based automatic transmission is never going to extol their reliability or ease of repair. Those also are doing 1/10th of the work (for things like automatic engine tuning, wear adjustment, on the fly power band adjustment, altitude adjustment, anti-pollution adjustment, etc). The reason why people complain about modern cars is because computers have made it exceptionally easy to add massive amounts of new (and poorly tested, in many cases) functionality. And even the equivalent of DRM. If if you used current tech to implement the old feature set, and spent even a little effort making it open instead of DRM-ish, it could be even simpler and more reliable. But no one is doing that. Because it’s more profitable using it ‘for evil’, as it were.