Nanopierce Technologies (NPCT)

[jmhollen]

Hey db,

It's quite difficult for most folks who live and deal in a Macro world to get a grip on "..nano.." dimensions.

I'm working from pure recollection at the moment, but I recall the conductor separation on the substrate of SRAM and DRAM chips at White Oak to be about 0.6 Microns.

Not being a micro-electonics guru, here's some of the jargon those guys deal with: Up to IBM's 0.5-µm technology generation, all versions of our capacitance extraction formulas were based on the analytic capacitance expressions for a cylinder above a plane and for a parallel-plate capacitor, plus new features to handle the wires on the left and right as well as the second conducting plane on top of it. As semiconductor feature sizes continue to shrink, the shape of the conducting wire changes from the old shape of fat-short to the new shape of thin-tall. Hence, the previous IBM capacitance extraction formulas became unacceptable for the new shape of metal wire cross-sections. http://www-3.ibm.com/chips/micronews/vol5_no4/lu_tong_conrad.html

micron A micron (short for micrometer) is one-millionth of a meter. It can also be expressed as:
10-6 meter
One thousandth of a millimeter
One 25-thousandth of an inch

A human hair is approximately 100 microns in diameter.

nanometer A nanometer is a unit of spatial measurement that is 10-9 meter, or one billionth of a meter. It is commonly used in nanotechnology, the building of extremely small machines.

"............Dat's really tiny...........", Troops. And, when you're trying to make hundreds of electrical connections in that size range, with absolute precision, quality and reliability - the challenges are awesome.

Rather like the wiring of Comander Data and his Positronic brain.........

Technology rules.


John

Park your Sub at the iHub - Bub; ....the experience might just "...float your boat..." !!