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The Near Impossibility of Making a Microchip

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The Near Impossibility of Making a Microchip The Near Impossibility of Making a Microchip The microchip seen here Somebody had to invent machinery is actually smaller than your thumbnail—as shown that could reliably and affordably lay on the last page. Amazingly, fabricators can down patterns with details as small (and must) mass-produce as 80-millionths of an inch. such chips while replicating every detail flawlessly. BY DANIEL P. BURBANK but economical. Achieving this demanded innovations at every step of the manufacturing process. In the late 1950s Jack Kilby at Texas Instruments To visualize the Kilby/Noyce/Moore in Dallas, and Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore, at process, imagine a manic real estate Fairchild Semiconductor near San Jose, California, developer building an entire town at once. independently came up with ways to cram many First hundreds of bulldozers dig all the tiny transistors and resistors onto a small sliver of basements; then a fleet of cement trucks silicon. By adding microscopic wires to pours all the foundations; then an army of interconnect groups of adjacent components, they carpenters completes all the floors, then made the first integrated circuits, which are now the walls, then the upper stories and roofs; known informally as chips. The potential range of and finally all the streets are paved. In this applications was vast, limited only by the power of analogy the individual buildings 1950s imaginations to conceive of refrigerator-size correspond to individual transistors and computers shrunk to the size of a postage stamp. resistors, the streets to connections As with most technological breakthroughs, between them, and the blocks of buildings however, a brilliant idea was only the first step. and neighborhoods to functional circuits. The earliest chips of any complexity were logic In real life, of course, this method would circuits that went into the guidance systems of make no sense for building a town. But for intercontinental ballistic missiles. For this fabricating integrated circuits, which are application, mass production was not necessary, built from successive layers of silicon and cost was of secondary importance. For chips compounds and aluminum laid down with to become as ubiquitous as they are today, though, microscopic precision, it's the key to mass the technology had to be made not only feasible COURTESY OF INTEL MUSUEM © FALL 1999·INVENTION & TECHNOLOGY 44 When its first projection device needed 16 lenses, Perkin-Elmer decided to try a new approach production. Many things had to be an acid bath, leaving the mask pattern Different combinations of ultraviolet light through a mask; worked out along the way: isolating in aluminum topped with exposed chemicals are used on different dissolve the unhardened photoresist; and purifying the different photoresist. That hardened layers, but the basic procedure is the etch away some or all of the revealed substances, finding ways of photoresist is removed with another same: Deposit a solid film; cover it film; and then dissolve the remaining depositing them, making them adhere solvent, leaving just the network of with photoresist; imprint a pattern on photoresist. The earliest integrated to the silicon wafer and to one aluminum lines. the photoresist by shining intense circuits usually required about eight another, and dozens of additional masking steps. details. One of the most important Experience made the masking was ensuring that the minute and procedure work reasonably well, and complicated patterns for each layer, by the mid-1960s many chip makers as drawn up by the circuit designer, were building their own machines to were accurately reproduced on the do the job for about $10,000 apiece. surface of the chip. The trouble was that the patterns being reproduced on the chips had Chip fabricators achieve this details as small as 10 wavelengths of precision with the help of light- ultraviolet light. So the mask had to sensitive compounds and masks. For be clamped tightly to the wafer to example, let's say it's time to deposit prevent blurring at the edges of the the thin lines of aluminum that image. Despite elaborate procedures connect the components with one aimed at maintaining pristine "clean another. Fabricators start by laying rooms," tiny particles of dirt or dust down a solid layer of aluminum and would get stuck between the mask covering it with a solid layer of and the wafer. By the time eight steps photoresist, a plastic resin that had been completed, a high hardens when exposed to ultraviolet percentage of chips were defective. light. A glass mask with a negative Worse, particles often damaged the image of the interconnect pattern is mask, and even after they had been placed on top of the photoresist, removed, the defect remained to be image side down. Then a bright replicated on all later images. The ultraviolet light is trained upon the smaller and simpler a circuit was, the mask, "exposing" the photoresist like greater chance it had of getting film in a camera. Afterward a solvent through the process intact. The dissolves the unhardened photoresist, dismal economics of defects revealing the underlying portions of Pioneers of the Micralign include Peter Moller, fourth aluminum. These are removed with from left; John Bossung, fifth from left; Harold Hemstreet, third from right; Abe Offner, second from right; and Jere COURTESY SVG Buckley, far right, with their creation in 1977. © FALL 1999·INVENTION & TECHNOLOGY 45 from contact printing placed a low equivalent of more than 300 million an engineer who worked on the to resolve those billion pixels all at ceiling on practical circuit pixels (picture elements) on a two- project for Perkin-Elmer, "but we once. He needed only to achieve complexity, even for well-funded inch wafer, which may contain hadn't really accomplished what high precision in a small area and U.S. Air Force programs. The Air hundreds or thousands of chips. the government wanted, a viable use it to scan the mask a little at a Force was looking hard for a way out (By comparison, a high-quality commercial product." Abe Offner, time, the way a photocopier scans a from under this ceiling. The 35mm camera lens resolves about who was one of Perkin-Elmer's sheet of paper. He accomplished this obvious solution was to separate 6 million pixels in a 28-by-35- most formidable optical designers, by cleverly combining two spherical the mask and wafer using a lens to millimeter format, roughly half the agrees: "It was at the very limits of mirrors in such a way that there was project an image of the mask onto area.) To achieve such high what could be manufactured at the a small ring in their image field in the wafer, as in a photographic resolution, the Microprojector time. No one thought that we could which the mirrors' aberrations darkroom enlarger. used 16 lens elements. All those make it in production." canceled each other out. Perkin-Elmer of Norwalk, lenses meant that it worked only Offner's design paired a Connecticut, one of the foremost in a narrow 200-angstrom sliver erkin-Elmer's experience "primary" concave spherical mirror optical-instrument companies in the of the ultraviolet spectrum (which with the Microprojector about 10 inches across with a country, had a long history of extends from 40 to 4,000 Pconvinced Harold smaller, convex "secondary" one building special-purpose optical angstroms). Outside that range, Hemstreet, general manager about 2 inches across. (See Fig. 1.) systems for scientific work and the dispersion would cause a faulty of the electro-optics division, that By arranging them along a common defense industry. So it was no image. This meant that most of lenses were the wrong approach. axis of curvature, he made a distor- surprise when Perkin-Elmer was the light from the system's 1,000- With the Micro-projector still in tion-free ring about a millimeter awarded an Air Force contract to watt mercury-vapor lamp had to be development, he called once again wide, with a diameter of about 5 build a lens-based projector in June thrown away. on Abe Offner, who decided to inches around the axis of 1967. The use of multiple lenses has investigate reflective systems—those symmetry. (See Fig. 2.) Light from Within a few years the company another consequence that made the using mirrors instead of lenses. above the mask would travel in a W had come up with its Microprojector hard to operate. Reflective systems image light of path, with the mask at the top of Microprojector, which met the Air Before exposure, the mask and the all wavelengths in exactly the same one arm, the wafer at the top of the Force specifications but was less wafer must be aligned with great way, solving the problems of other, the concave primary mirror than satisfactory for industrial use. precision by a technician. The alignment and wavelength range. forming a base for the W and the The main problem was that lenses Microprojector system was made But they create distortion of their convex secondary at the middle refract light of different wavelengths to transmit ultraviolet light, and own, which is known as aberration. peak. Moreover, the magnification at different angles—a basic property designers found it impossible to For that reason, designers had was inherently IX, which meant that of glass called dispersion. Designers get enough visible light through the previously avoided them. And to mask features would be imaged at of optical systems have learned to labyrinth of lenses for humans to make matters worse, by this time the the same size on the wafer, and the combine elements of different see. Fortunately, at about that time, resolution requirements had gotten system was telecentric, meaning that shapes, made from different types night-vision apparatus developed for even tougher.
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