| ▲ | Electron microscopy shows ‘mouse bite’ defects in semiconductors(news.cornell.edu) |
| 76 points by hhs 4 days ago | 17 comments |
| |
|
| ▲ | bob1029 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| Metrology 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. |
|
| ▲ | loopback_device 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Original article: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-026-69733-1 |
|
| ▲ | kibibu 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > 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?) |
| |
| ▲ | bsder 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Presumably because he is a Cornell alumnus from 1990. The article is at cornell.edu . | | |
| ▲ | eichin 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Listing 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...) | |
| ▲ | userbinator 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I first thought it was supposed to be a comma, and that he's 90 years old. | |
| ▲ | kibibu 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Ahh makes a lot of sense |
| |
| ▲ | bitwize 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | University news sources often cite alums of the university with their year of graduation. |
|
|
| ▲ | chuckadams 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Put out some really tiny mousetraps then? |
| |
|
| ▲ | fleshmonad 26 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| He needs mouse bites to live |
|
| ▲ | Benjami71506444 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Solid work. The technical details are appreciated. |
|
| ▲ | 0xDEFACED 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| any 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 |
| |
| ▲ | adrian_b 20 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | For 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. | |
| ▲ | lovich 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Less likely than just inducing more demand from the AI firms | |
| ▲ | Joel_Mckay 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Silicon 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 |
|
