On Thu, 15 Nov 2018 23:25:18 +0000 (UTC)
jim bell <[email protected]> wrote:
> When I worked for Intel (1980-1982), a typical silicon linewidth was 3
> microns. (3000 nanometers.) Recently I saw that Intel was using a 10
> nanometer process, 300x smaller in linear size, and (300x)**2 (90,000)
> smaller in area. What's truly amazing is how they have come to be able to
> etch such small feature-sizes on silicon. For a long time, they were using
> 193 (?) nanometer UV light to do that, and yet they got feature-sizes below
> 50 nanometers.
Yes, that's interesting. At first I naively assumed that you couldn't
print stuff smaller than the wavelength used but that's not the case at all.
>(using a lot of photolithographic 'tricks' to do so!.) Now, I think they
>probably use "EUV", short for "Extreme Ultraviolet", which amounts to
>soft-xrays, maybe at about 10nm wavelength or even shorter.
>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_ultraviolet
Yeah, the accuracy is impressive. Now, from a libertarian point of
view, there's a huge accumulation of knowledge and 'capital' in the hands of
very few people. Also, many of these developments are govt subsidized in many
ways and end up in the hands of a few monopolistic businesses. What this boils
down to of course is the fact that the infrastructure is fully controlled by
the enemy.
> Hard-disk manufacturers probably characterize their platters in a similar
> way, looking for weak areas that have trouble recording data.
Yes, hard disks can mark and stop using bad sectors. Actually cheap
floppy disks controllers did the same thing...
>
> Jim Bell
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