The current microelectronics manufacturing method is expensive, slow and energy and resource intensive.
But a Northeastern University professor has patented a new process and printer that not only can manufacture advanced electronics and chips more efficiently and cheaply, it can make them at the nanoscale.
“I thought that there must be an easier way to do this, there must be a cheaper way to do this,” says Ahmed A. Busnaina, the William Lincoln Smith professor and a distinguished university professor at Northeastern University. “We started, basically, with very simple physical chemistry with a very simple approach.”
Busnaina runs the National Science Foundation Center for High-rate Nanomanufacturing at Northeastern University.
He explains that the conventional method of microelectronics fabrication basically works by depositing a material in a film and then “etching away” the excess. Each layer presents one part of the circuit and, after many layers build up, a microprocessor or a memory chip is created. For each material used, a different process is used.
But this process has several drawbacks, Busnaina says.
First, it is expensive.
Facilities to fabricate the advanced electronics and chips needed to power today’s electronics cost about $20 billion to $40 billion to build and then $1 billion to operate annually.
The expense of the manufacturing facilities — or “fabs” — means that the number of companies capable of building the necessary chips has gone from about 29 at the beginning of the millennium, to five as of 2018, Busnaina says.
This translates into a six-month to a one-year timeline to get a chip made, and any revisions after testing requires a similar timeline, Busnaina explains.
Moreover, he adds that a typical fab requires an amount of power equivalent to 50,000 homes, because of the need for a vacuum and high temperatures in the manufacturing process.
In contrast, Busnaina has developed an additive, “bottom up” manufacturing process at Northeastern’s Burlington campus for silicon microprocessor or memory chips that lowers the manufacturing cost of electronics to roughly 1% of the current method.
It’s kind of like sculpting something out of clay rather than sculpting something out of stone — you build up, rather than chip away.
“We don’t remove anything,” Busnaina says. “We only deposit the material we need at the location we need it.”
And the materials can be deposited in a very fast process using very small particles, Busnaina says, enabling one to create very small objects at a fraction of the time of traditional nanofabrication or 3-D printing.
“We showed that we can do structures down to 25 nanometers in one minute, for example, over a large area,” Busnaina says. “So it’s high throughput, very low cost.”
Busnaina predicts that the new method and tool could “democratize” the process of chip manufacturing.
“It’s like the old Kinkos — where you’d go and you make your own copies,” Busnaina says. “Now you can go to a 3D printing shop and give them your chip design, and they’ll make it for you the same day or the next day.”
“Imagine if every chip designer can actually have the chance to get their design in the same week and then do development and then scale it up,” Busnaina continues. “You will not only democratize the nano-manufacturing of electronics, you will accelerate the pace of innovation in electronics and make all electronics very affordable.”