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Faster circuits go for gold |
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Monday, April 26 2004 @ 01:39 PM EDT
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 Mark Peplow
Creating tiny golden images in blocks of glass might seem like the latest in up-market jewellery design. But the technique could lead to a new generation of electronics.
One route to faster computing is to increase the number of connections between components in a circuit. But computer chip manufacturers are fast running out of room on conventional, flat circuit boards. So for the next generation of chips, the only way is up.
"The microelectronics industry is two-dimensional at the moment," says Mark Miodownik, materials scientist from King's College London. "Going up to three dimensions opens up the potential for faster chips and bigger memory."
Going dotty
Making a three-dimensional circuit is no easy task, however. At the moment, chip designers build them layer by layer, but this is a laborious process and it limits the designs that can be used. Now Jianrong Qiu, a physicist at the Shanghai Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics, and colleagues from China and Japan have worked out a way to draw the desired circuit directly into a block of glass.
The secret was to add gold oxide to the glass, at a concentration of one part in 10,000. Then they focused short laser pulses on to specific points inside the block, to dislodge individual atoms of gold. When the block was heated to 550 ºC, the gold atoms coalesced into tiny globules. The blobs make up a dotty structure in the same way that newspaper photographs are made from many tiny points of ink.
Rest of the article.
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| Authored by: Gold-Investor on Monday, April 26 2004 @ 01:44 PM EDT |
Gold and laser key to 3D circuits
Lucy Sherrif
Physicists in Shanghai have developed a revolutionary new technique for building three-dimensional micro-circuits, using gold oxide, chunks of glass and some high powered lasers to create a kind of 3D dot-matrix transistor-printer.
Taking circuit boards into 3D is a logical and neccessary next step: although chip makers are squeezing as much as they can on to circuit boards, going up as well as out would help enormously. In fact, finding an inexpensive and reliable way of creating a 3D circuit is something of a holy grail for scientists in the field.
Existing techniques include sequential fabrication. In this case, the circuit is built up layer by layer: one layer fabricated, then a layer of material is deposited on top, then another layer can be fabricated, and so on. The trouble with this is that the lower layers are 'cooked' too many times.
Another method involves stacking completed wafers on top on each other and somehow bonding them together. Still another involves literally soldering two chips on top of each other. All are basically variations on a theme of the traditional circuit board fab process.
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, May 02 2004 @ 12:40 PM EDT |
Intel gets eco-friendly, promises lead-free chips and processors
Anuradha Krishnamurthy
"Since 2000, Intel has been working with the industry and the European Union's Restriction of Hazardous Substances (RoHS) legislation committee to come up with global solution to this problem. The company developed reference procedures on its own research assembly lines to help its customers implement lead-free technology in the manufacturing process.
Lead has been used in electronics for more than one hundred years because of its electrical and mechanical
properties. It has been a scientific and technical challenge for industry researchers to develop new materials that meet the performance and reliability standards for the manifold ways lead is utilized for components, products, and assembly processes
Intel shipped its first lead-free Plastic Ball Grid Array package in 2002 for use with its flash-memory. The lead/tin solder previously used for connecting this package to the motherboard was replaced with a tin/silver/copper alloy. This work created a benchmark for Intel's foray into to lead-free technology."
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