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To: Sarmad Y. Hermiz who wrote (228905)	3/25/2007 7:20:40 PM
From: neolib	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 275872

Yes I did. You said 100 atoms. This link, also quoting an IBM person mentions 14 atoms. And I read that Intel's 45 nm has some structures that are 2 atoms thick. The 100 atoms are dopant ions in the channel, the 14 atoms you quote are oxide thickness. As noted, 65nm gate oxide is around 5-6nm (IBM is a bit thinner than Intel IIRC). Most of the talk in recent years has centered on gate oxide scaling problems, so I found the paper interesting because it looks like channel implant is claimed to be a significant problem, much more so if you are counting atoms. The total atom count variation in the gate oxide layer is much worse than 100 atoms I would guess. So from an atomic standpoint, it looks like implant is a more critical process. Another source of intrinsic device variability arises from atomic-scale oxide thickness variations. Physical gate oxide thickness is currently down to 1 nm, equivalent to approximately five inter-atomic spacings. Yes, as I had mentioned. However, the total atomic count in the gate oxide is on the order of 200 x 200 x 5 = 200,000 atoms (back of the envelope) with +/-1 layer (per the article) so perhaps +/- 40K atoms. So while the layer count is critical in gate oxide, if you are looking for process variation that is approaching single atom issues, it looks like channel implant is the critical one by a wide margin.