Taking microelectronics research to the atomic size future and beyond
Thursday, June 9, 2016 - 08:51
in Physics & Chemistry
At the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, N.Y., tucked between office desks and meeting rooms, there is approximately 40,000 square feet of cleanroom space which comprises the Microelectronics Research Lab (MRL). These cleanrooms consist of highly sophisticated tools run by a skilled team of engineers and scientists who spend their days processing silicon wafer after silicon wafer, and fabricating them into transistors and semiconductor devices, which are the brains of integrated circuits. To put this into perspective, the latest smartphones have billions of these tiny transistors inside just one of them.