Electron microscopy shows 'mouse bite' defects in semiconductors

(news.cornell.edu)

34 points | by hhs 4 days ago

4 comments

  • kibibu 1 hour ago
    > At Bell Labs, Muller and fellow scientist Glen Wilk ’90, who is now vice president of technology at ASM, tried replacing silicon dioxide - the prevailing gate material, which leaked too much current at small scales – with hafnium oxide.

    They are naming professors like "Now That's What I Call Music" albums now?

    (I genuinely can't find why there's a '90 there, suspect it's a copy/paste error?)

    • bsder 1 hour ago
      Presumably because he is a Cornell alumnus from 1990. The article is at cornell.edu .
      • kibibu 33 minutes ago
        Ahh makes a lot of sense
  • loopback_device 2 hours ago
  • 0xDEFACED 2 hours ago
    any hope that this could be applied to improving memory fab yields and ease some of the capacity constraints on consumer devices? asking for a friend
    • Joel_Mckay 22 minutes ago
      Silicon has 23 known isotopes, and now you why it will unlikely ever be economical to reach 0 defects in a business context.

      Modern chip designs do include over-provisioned features, so designers can often selectively downgrade areas that are not viable.

      Chenming Hu books about solar cell physics and semiconductors are quite accessible. =3

    • lovich 1 hour ago
      Less likely than just inducing more demand from the AI firms