Creating 1 Um Features The Hacker Way

August 6, 2024 by Julian Scheffers 9 Comments

[Breaking Taps] has done some lithography experiments in the past, including some test patterns and a rudimentary camera sensor. But now, it’s time to turn it up a notch with 1µm garage semiconductor ambitions.

The e-beam lithography he’s done in the past can achieve some impressive resolutions, but they aren’t very fast; a single beam of electrons needs to scan over the entire exposure area, somewhat like a tiny crayon. That’s not very scalable; he needed a better solution to make 1µm semiconductors.

In his quest, he starts by trying to do maskless photolithography, using a literal projector to shine light on the target area all at once. After hacking a projector devkit apart, replacing blue with ultraviolet and adding custom optics, it’s time for a test. The process works for the most part but can’t produce fine details the way [Breaking Taps] needs. Unfortunately, fixing that would mean tearing the whole set-up apart for the umpteenth time.
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TSMC’s Long Path From Round To Square Silicon Wafers

June 23, 2024 by Maya Posch 45 Comments

Most of us will probably have seen semiconductor wafers as they trundle their way through a chip factory, and some of us may have wondered about why they are round. This roundness is an obvious problem when one considers that the chip dies themselves are rectangular, meaning that a significant amount of the dies etched into the wafers end up being incomplete and thus as waste, especially with (expensive) large dies. This is not a notion which has escaped the attention of chip manufacturers like TSMC, with this particular manufacturer apparently currently studying a way to make square substrates a reality.

According to the information provided to Nikkei Asia by people with direct knowledge, currently 510 mm x 515 mm substrates are being trialed which would replace the current standard 12″ (300 mm) round wafers. For massive dies such as NVidia’s H200 (814 mm²), this means that approximately three times as many would fit per wafer. As for when this technology will go into production is unknown, but there exists significant incentive in the current market to make it work.

As for why wafers are round, this is because of how these silicon wafers are produced, using the Czochralski method, named after Polish scientist [Jan Czochralski] who invented the method in 1915. This method results in rod-shaped crystals which are then sliced up into the round wafers we all know and love. Going square is thus not inherently impossible, but it will require updating every step of the process and the manufacturing line to work with this different shape.

Hackaday Links: May 12, 2024

May 12, 2024 by Dan Maloney 9 Comments

Don’t pack your bags for the trip to exoplanet K2-18b quite yet — it turns out that the James Webb Space Telescope may not have detected signs of life there after all. Last year, astronomers reported the possible presence of dimethyl sulfide there, a gas that (at least on Earth) is generally associated with phytoplankton in the ocean. Webb used its infrared spectrometer instruments to look at the light from the planet’s star, a red dwarf about 111 light-years away, as it passed through the hydrogen-rich atmosphere. The finding was sort of incidental to the discovery of much stronger signals for methane and carbon dioxide, but it turns out that the DMS signal might have just been overlap from the methane signal. It’s too bad, because K2-18b seems to be somewhat Earth-like, if you can get over the lack of oxygen and the average temperature just below freezing. So, maybe not a great place to visit, but it would be nice to see if life, uh, found a way anywhere else in the universe.

Attention Fortran fans: your favorite language isn’t quite dead yet. In fact, it cracked the top ten on one recent survey, perhaps on the strength of its numerical and scientific applications. The “Programming Community Index” is perhaps a bit subjective, since it’s based on things like Google searches for references to particular languages. It’s no surprise then that Python tops such a list, but it’s still interesting that there’s enough interest in a 67-year-old programming language to make it onto the list. We’d probably not advise building a career around Fortran, but you never know.

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