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Politics : Formerly About Applied Materials -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Katherine Derbyshire who wrote (48857)	7/8/2001 4:32:54 PM
From: Zeev Hed	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 70976

Katherine, I know quite well, I even have a small patent of my own on a JJ junction built that way. There is really nothing new in that approach. The better mobility in SiGe (relative to normal Si) helps to increase frequency as well as reduce heat dissipation per switching, but the density of devices per square inch of substrate's real estate is still limited by lithography. Furthermore, it is not clear at what point the "laws of solid state physics" are no longer valid. A cluster of 1000 atoms (10X10X10) will not necessarily behave like bulk (or even microbulk) material. Diffusion in and out of junctions becomes quite problematic, quantum tunneling becomes a problem, and a host of other problems, such as severe electromigration will also pose intrinsic technological problems. Don't belive what you hear and only half of what you read. I remember IBM some 20 years ago investing $100 MM into JJ technology to achieve 100 GHz type devices in "four years", that seems to be the constant "future" time scale (g). Going down the "design rules reduction" path was somewhat predictable, going the path of quantum fluctuations physics less so. Consider that a cube of 10X10X10 atoms has at least four different "band structures", the 3d edge, the 2d edges, the outer planes and the central region. That band structure is further influenced by what these species interface with. Zeev