Newswise — Today, chipmakers routinely squeeze 2 billion transistors into an area the size of the period at the end of this sentence. The key driver of the $200-billion-a-year semiconductor industry is a method of tiny writing called lithography. But optical lithography is approaching some fundamental physical limits: You can't build a device smaller than one atom.
Over the next 43 years, progress won't be tied to scaling the way it has been for the last 43 years. Instead it will depend on new architectures and materials that will make transistors and the chips they reside on unrecognizable. In the April issue of IEEE Spectrum, ASML chief scientist Bill Arnold makes the case for extreme ultraviolet lithography as the only feasible next step for chip manufacturing, and explains how the diverging paths of memory and logic will shape the future of lithography.
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