Researchers at Bell Labs have used an electron beam to create features on a computer chip that are smaller than can be achieved with today's chip-making methods.
While the development is significant to chip designers, it will be years before it is common in chip manufacturing and affects the performance of electronic products that use chips.However, a Bell Labs spokesman said Monday the process could be incorporated into manufacturing easily and represented more than an advance that worked only under laboratory conditions.
The technique can be used to create circuits that are separated by just 0.08 microns of space, Bell Labs said. A micron is one-millionth of a meter, about 1-25,000th of an inch.
A reduction in the amount of space between circuits allows chipmakers to fit more circuits on a chip, increasing its performance. The most advanced chips that are now widely available have circuits that are 0.35 microns apart.
Chipmakers are now developing manufacturing processes for chips with circuits that are 0.25 microns and 0.18 microns apart. But many engineers believe the way chips are now created, using ultraviolet light to "imprint" a circuit design onto silicon, won't work past 0.10 microns.
Electron beams have been considered a viable alternative to ultraviolet light since the 1970s and have been used, in some cases, to make repairs to test versions of new chips.
Bell Labs is the research arm of Lucent Technologies Inc., which was spun off from AT&T Corp. earlier this year.