HP touts new mold for the chip industry
Hewlett-Packard and Nanolithosolutions say they have a machine that will let semiconductor manufacturers produce chips sporting wires measuring a few atoms wide. And the device takes only a few minutes to install.
The machine is a system for imprint lithography. Imprint lithography sounds like what it is: A mold with an intricate pattern is pressed into a substrate, which creates a pattern. The grooves and channels created in the substrate are then filled with metal to make wires. What makes imprint lithography different from a waffle iron or a rubber stamp are the dimensions. The HP-Nanolitho system is capable of creating grooves that will measure as small as 15 nanometers, smaller than the width of wires in today’s chip. The mold, or module, does not make grooves in silicon, but in a thin layer of polymer on top of the silicon.
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