Webex Event number: 120 875 8972
Webex Event password: N2p3FBphkD9
Abstract: 1960 is year 1 for miniaturization. It was the year that Feynman published his challenges in 'There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom', Mollenstedt demonstrated microwriting with an electron microscope and it is year 1 of Moore's Law. By 1970 IC's featured linewidths of 10-20 micron, contained at most several hundred transistors and could be reliably made using contact and proximity printing tools costing about $20,000. Starting in 1970 there began a serious push to miniaturize integrated circuits notably at IBM, Bell Labs and Caltech. The benefits of scaling were formalized: as the circuits became denser delays shrank proportionally and, more importantly, the energy/computing function shrank as the cube of the feature size. This realization led to intense activity. Projection printers replaced proximity printers, electron beam lithography was introduced for making photomasks and chemically amplified resists with extraordinarily high contrast replaced traditional photoresist. The tools became increasingly expensive and more automated and design tools made possible the designing of chips with a billion transistors. The outcome was that Moore's Law (the doubling of the number of transistors/chip every 18months) kept going for 30 years after Moore himself predicted its imminent stop in 1977. But now the shrinking is slowing and it appears that the most promising way forward is to exploit aggressively the third dimension by stacking active devices.
Biography: After finishing high school in 1955 Fabian Pease joined the Royal Air Force where he became a radar officer. From 1957 to 1964 he studied Natural Sciences and Engineering at Trinity College, Cambridge. His PhD project featured building the first scanning electron microscope to achieve 10nm resolution. He then joined the faculty at U.C. Berkeley where he and his colleague Tom Hayes demonstrated the first SEM images of a living creature (a flour beetle). In 1967 he joined Bell Laboratories where he first researched digital television and then supervised a group developing processes for electron beam lithography. His group demonstrated the first integrated circuit made with electron beam lithography and developed the industry-wide procedure used for the manufacture of photomasks. He joined the Electrical Engineering Faculty at Stanford University in 1978. His research group's accomplishments include demonstrating a 50-fold improvement in removing heat from silicon chips, the first writing with a scanning tunneling microscope, winning the Feynman Prize for nanoscale writing and demonstrating a process for controllably making silicon pillars 2 nm diameter. He spent a Sabbatical year with Affymetrix researching ways to fabricate DNA microarrays and from 1996 to 1998 was on assignment to DARPA as a Program Manager. Since 2015 he has been working with Prof. Manu Prakash (BioE Stanford) and Prof. Alireza Nojeh (an alumnus of his group) at UBC to develop an SEM that can be sold for $150.