What will chip manufacturing go after 3nm? June 13, 2020 11:48:04 Zhitong Financial Network
There are many choices of post-Moore technology, such as GAA promoted by Samsung and negative capacitance transistor promoted by Professor Hu Zhengming, the inventor of FinFET, are all representatives of it, carbon nanotubes are the school that another group of people insist on.
The atomic diameter of carbon nanotube technology ensures that the device has excellent grid electrostatic control capability and is easier to overcome short channel effect.
Its ultra-high carrier mobility ensures higher performance and lower power consumption of the device.
Therefore, this material is considered as an ideal material for constructing sub -10 nanometer transistors. Many theoretical studies also show that carbon nanotube devices have 5-10 times advantages in speed and power consumption compared with silicon-based devices, and are expected to meet the development needs of "post-Moor era" integrated circuits.
The application of carbon nanotubes is not only possible to move the existing technology forward several technical nodes, but may provide a completely new possibility.
It has been proved that carbon nanotube technology can go to the physical limit with a simple plane technology, without the need to develop more complex three-dimensional transistor technology like silicon technology, such as FinFET, to reduce the short channel effect.
In addition, carbon nanotube technology is a low-temperature technology that can prepare three-dimensional chips. You know, the biggest obstacle to silicon chip stacking is heat dissipation. If it is low temperature technology, it can be stacked infinitely in theory.
This opens up a broad space for future chip manufacturing, it is expected to improve the performance of existing chips by thousands of times.
In 2017, Peng Lianmao-Zhang Zhiyong, a research group from the School of Information Science and Technology of Peking University, researched 5 nanometer carbon nanotube CMOS devices, pushing the transistor performance to the theoretical limit.
Professor Peng's team made a processor consisting of 14000 carbon nanotube transistors. This success is of great significance, marking the fact that the carbon nanotube CMOS technology is rapidly maturing and moving towards application.
This is very important for China's semiconductor industry, which has not fully mastered advanced semiconductor preparation technologies (such as FinFET and morpheme and nanoscale technologies that may appear at the next 3 nanotechnology nodes).
This is a brand-new framework and a brand-new path, which is most likely the real future hope of China's semiconductor technology.
Carbon nanotube technology is a basic technology, which may have a significant impact on all aspects of electronic technology in the future.
At present, the comprehensive performance of the prepared small-scale carbon nanotube transistor is more than ten times higher than that of the commercial silicon-based 14 nanometer transistor.
In Professor Peng's opinion, the biggest problem facing the manufacturing and even commercial use of carbon nanotubes is still the determination of the country. If the country provides support for traditional integrated circuit technology and the full support from the industry, commercial carbon-based chips should appear in 3-5 years, and carbon-based chips will enter high-end and mainstream applications within 10 years.
Appendix: Carbon Nanotubes for Digital Logic (from IBM 2015)
(Editor: Cheng Yixing)
