This year’s top semiconductor stories were mostly about the long and twisting trips a technology takes from idea (or even raw material) to commercial deployment. I’ve been at IEEE Spectrum long enough to have seen some of the early days of things that became commercial only this year.
In chip-making that includes the production of the next evolution of transistor design—nanosheet transistors—and the arrival of nanoimprint lithography. In optoelectronics, it was the commercialization of optical fiber links that go directly into the processor package.
Of course there were also great new technologies recently born, like growing diamond inside ICs to cool them. But there were also, unfortunately, developments that are getting in the way of moving technologies from the laboratory to the semiconductor fab.
Still, if anything, the year’s best semiconductor stories showed that technology is full of fascinating tales.
Peter Crowther
It seems one of our readers’ favorite things was this cool idea. Perhaps you read it while chilling out with a print copy of Spectrum or maybe while on your phone and icing a sore knee. (Okay. I’ll stop.) Stanford professor Srabanti Chowdhury explained how her team has come up with a way to grow diamonds inside ICs, mere nanometers from heat generating transistors. The result was radio devices that were more than 50 degrees Celsius cooler, and a pathway to integrate the highly heat-conductive material in 3D chips. The article was part of a special report on the problem of heat in computing that includes an article on cooling chips with lasers and other great reads.
Left: Stefan Ziegenbalg; Right: ASML
This one had a little bit of everything. It’s the story of how ASML figured out a key unknown in the development of one of the most crucial (and craziest) contraptions in technology today, the light source for extreme ultraviolet lithography. But it’s also a sweet story of a man and his grandfather—but with supernovas, atomic bomb blasts, high-powered lasers, and a cameo by computer pioneer John von Neumann.
Mingrui Ao, Xiucheng Zhou et al.
In past years, we’ve reported plenty about advances in making individual 2D transistors work well. But in April we delivered a story of some 2D semiconductor integration heroics. Researchers in China managed to integrate nearly 6,000 molybdenum disulfide devices to make a RISC-V processor. Amazingly, despite using just laboratory-level manufacturing, the chip’s creators achieve a 99.7 percent yield of good transistors.
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