Flying plasmonic lens system could lead to denser chips / disks

Last we heard, IBM was busy extending optical lithography down to 30-nanometers in order to keep Moore's Law intact, and some two years later, the process is still being honed by engineers at the University of California, Berkeley. Reportedly, gurus there with IQs far greater than ours have developed a new patterning technique (plasmonic nanolithography) that could make "current microprocessors more than 10 times smaller, but far more powerful." Additionally, professor Xiang Zhang asserts that this same technology could eventually "lead to ultra-high density disks that could hold 10 to 100 times more data than disks today." The secret to the madness is a flying plasmonic head, which is compared to the arm and stylus of an LP turntable; the setup enables researchers to "create line patterns only 80-nanometers wide at speeds up to 12-meters per second, with the potential for higher resolution detail in the near future." In layman's terms? That CPU you purchased last month will, in fact, be old hat in due time.

[Via Slashdot]

[Anthony @ Oct 27th 2008 5:04AM]

next up .... crysis mobile ;]

i am hopeful

[Orpheus @ Oct 27th 2008 5:24AM]

Flying plasmonic lenses?? Admit it, you guys are just making this stuff up...

[OneLove @ Oct 27th 2008 10:51AM]

flying plasmonkeys

[j_g_puff @ Oct 27th 2008 5:40AM]

I guess they'll have to stop calling them steppers...and start calling them 'spinny flying plasmonatorz'.

[Scotty Doo @ Oct 27th 2008 5:43AM]

By the time this technology is in use Crysis will look like Wolfenstein 3D in comparison.

[Nineteen88 @ Oct 27th 2008 5:57AM]

So, does that make Blu-Ray obsolete?

[JohnM @ Oct 27th 2008 6:50AM]

Blu-Ray is already obsolete! The others just haven't made it to the mainstream yet!

[KarlW @ Oct 27th 2008 7:44AM]

"Blu-Ray is already obsolete! The others just haven't made it to the mainstream yet!"

If the competitors haven't made it to the mainstream, how exactly is Blu-Ray obsolete?

[j_g_puff @ Oct 27th 2008 8:22AM]

@alphachapmtl, Ninteen88:

This is not a technology which would ever make it into a consumer product: as Johan says, it's a manufacturing process.

Silicon chips are fabricated by a process called photolithography (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photolithography). It basically involves projecting a pattern onto a piece of silicon - the idea is very similar to the way in which PCBs are made, but obviously way more complicated.

This technology is an improvement to this process which allows a smaller 'feature size'. This equates to smaller transistors and ram cells, which in turn equate to higher density memory and processors with more bits.

Hope that clears things up a bit.

[Chuck @ Oct 27th 2008 6:19AM]

Last I check we're trying to get rid of the moving parts in computers. Maybe making them smaller works to.

Then again, this article is as far above my head as this technology is from actual application.

[Johan S @ Oct 27th 2008 6:37AM]

They are talking about a manufacturing process, not a type of chip. This is a technique they can use to manufacture microprocessors etc. in the future that have much smaller features than today.

[Wwhat @ Oct 27th 2008 7:37PM]

You'll have to design everything in curves though, and a separate layout for the distance from the center, I'm figuring.

[Ebzy @ Oct 27th 2008 6:39AM]

Professor Xiang Zhang has a really cool name.

Just saying...

[jorvay @ Oct 27th 2008 9:21AM]

I actually had a friend in University named Xiang Zhang. Awesome name, but he insisted on going by Jackie. To each his own.

[bc90021 @ Oct 27th 2008 7:30AM]

Does anyone else think that "plasmonic nanolithography" is the first actual technology created that has a name that sounds like it could easily be used in a script for "Star Trek"?

[Bryan Thornsberry @ Oct 27th 2008 11:17AM]

ha... i was thinking the same thing. well played, sir.

[rita hainsworth @ Oct 27th 2008 7:38AM]

Not ANOTHER Flying Plasmonic Lens!

[alphachapmtl @ Oct 27th 2008 7:38AM]

This could take 30 years to be in an actual product.

[rems @ Oct 27th 2008 8:19AM]

Well I hope that by the time we have these lasers available to mass production, we will have lots of 12Krpm hard disk drives motors available on the market in order to be able to write/read stuff at 12m/s from 1cm of the plate's center. But I wonder if investing in SSD isn't investing smarter since you don't have to waste energy to have the plates turn since there aren't any...

[grillface @ Oct 27th 2008 8:26AM]

If you read the article properly, you'll see that they are referring to a *manufacturing process* for processors. No moving parts.

[roocell @ Oct 27th 2008 9:11AM]

what does this have to do with CPU?
seems like it's just improving the media (ie - disks, harddrive, etc).

[Testies, Testies, 1, 2... 3? @ Oct 27th 2008 12:48PM]

Serious! After looking briefly at the picture, that's my exact conclusion!

After all, isn't everyone's media transistor etched silicon discs?