Ehsan Saeedi, Shaghayegh Abbasi, Karl F. B¨ohringer and Babak A. Parviz
FDMP, vol.2, no.4, pp.221-245, 2006
Some information on the state of manufacturing micro- and
nanotechnology circuits. From the paper it seems microelectronics is a
much more mature technology then nanotech. In 2006 Nanotech was faced
with many obstacles for creating functional large scale integrated
circuits. In 2006 there were many challenges and much of the work was
highly experimental.
4-5 years in the cutting edge of technology can bring significant
advances though. Very Large Scale Integration is probably not possible
at the moment and the paper gives no estimates of what yield levels are
like. This is the significant challenge with VLSI. Making devices with
hundreds of millions of components all which work perfectly is very
hard. Bell Labs when first experimenting with integrated circuits in the
mid-20th century said they couldn't be made because though they could
fabricate 20 transistors onto a silicon or gallium arsenide wafer (can't
remember if they'd started to use silicon yet) they couldn't do it
reliably enough for a production line. When I was at university they
could fabricate 2 billion transistors onto a 1cm square of silicon in
the lab however these ultra-high densities have not been seen in
commercial products since I left university almost a decade ago. Yield
is a critical factor in large systems integration technology reaching
the market place.
The potential of nanotechnology is huge as the science starts making
functional units and small circuits at the nano scale. I'll have to work
through the calculations but I think a high quality bionic contact lens
will require nanotechnology to achieve realistic levels of resolution.
Even a 1 megapixel bionic lens needs to fit the LEDS into a 1.2mm circle
(roughly) which means each pixel consisting of 3 LEDS (Red Green Blue)
will be less than a micrometre. One megapixel is a 1000 x 1000 screen
which when placed over the eye won't give very high resolution. 5000 x
5000 will make a photorealistic rendering of information using a bionic
contact lens but the technology to produce this sort of very high level
of miniaturisation and high productions yields is, in my opinion, a very
far distance in the future..
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