Edwin C' Kan Cornell University

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Edwin C. KanCornell University
Nanotechnology
Small is Power!!!
If you can organize or coordinate many of them...
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What is big? What is Small?
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Jeffrey 2 Times Smaller Than Daddy
Oct. 1996, Honolulu
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If Jeffrey were 10 Times Smaller Than Daddy in
linear scale
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If Jeffrey Had Grown 10 Times Since Then??
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What is the Inside Magic?
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Lets Get Inside to Take a Look
A silicon chip with many many small components!!!
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Scale and Power!!
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The Concepts of A Billion 109

• By counting 1, 2, 3,... even you can speak
  really fast and doing nothing else. You need to
  be at least 30 years old to finish counting to a
  billion (109).
• A thousand biggest dinosaurs, brachiosaurus, are
  still shorter than a billion (109 ) ants in line.
• 40 of your hair together is about one millimeter
  (mm). A billion (109) of it can reach the highest
  plane in the sky (25km) .

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1 meter Picture
1 meter
(Photo courtesy from Powers of Ten, Scientific
America)
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10 Times Smaller
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100 Times Smaller
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1,000 Times Smaller
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10,000 (104) Times Smaller
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100,000 (105) Times Smaller
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106 Times Smaller
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107 Times Smaller
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108 Times Smaller
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109 Times Smaller (Nano!!)
1.6nm
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Guess What This Is?
A dog? A wombat?
A dust particle sitting on a computer line
(magnified approximately 105 or 100,000 times)
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What Is This??
A dragon? A tape?
A scratch on the metal surface by dusts or other
contaminants (magnified 200,000 times)
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And This?
A bees nest? Jelly beans?
Dirty surface after high temperature
processing (magnified 200,000 times)
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Take a Closer Look
The segregated thin-film material (magnified
500,000 times)
The damaged surface beside a good computer line
(line width 2mm)
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Now What Is This?
An algae farm? An alien nest?
Surface after dirty solution treatment (magnified
200,000 times)
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Take a Closer Look
Lines and surfaces that are contaminated (magnifie
d 200,000 times)
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Broken Small Structures
Though small structures are relatively strong, we
still need to be extra careful. (magnified
100,000 times)
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Good Parts!!
Six layers of copper lines
First metal lines
Contact plugs
Transistors
Transistors (magnified 500,000 times)
Connecting micro-lines
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So How Can We Integrate 109 Parts?

• We need to be VERY careful and VERY clean.
• We need to do many parts in parallel (that is,
  make 109 of them at the same time), not in series
  (that is, not one by one)
• taking a photograph
• printing a map
• We need to learn how to manipulate the small
  structures they are relatively strong, but the
  forces are very different