2 thoughts on “3-D Transistors”

  1. Conventional lithography can still be used for the next couple of silicon manufacturing nodes but it increasingly depends on multiple-patterning. The problem with multiple-patterning is that it increases the exposure time and decreases production output. People have been working on EUV (it would be more appropriate to call it soft x-rays) lithography but they have a lot of issues left to solve and production output is still low. Other techniques like e-beam are mostly useful for making masks since the manufacturing is really slow by like an order of magnitude or two depending on the technique used.

    So far performance increases have been achieved by also changing the materials used to make the devices and being more clever with chip design but techniques like that cannot be scaled to the degree that lithography was scaled for all these decades.

    Self-assembly techniques have a lot of problems as well.

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