A Berkeley Lab-Intel collaboration outlines the chemistry of photoresist, enabling smaller features for future generations of microprocessors.
Over the years, computer chips have gotten smaller thanks to advances in materials science and manufacturing technologies. This march of progress, the doubling of transistors on a microprocessor roughly every two years, is called Moore’s Law. But there’s one component of the chip-making process in need of an overhaul if Moore’s law is to continue: the chemical mixture called photoresist. Similar to film used in photography, photoresist, also just called resist, is used to lay down the patterns of ever-shrinking lines and features on a chip (more…)
Question: “What did you do this summer?” Answer: “I built the Advanced Light Source.”
It’s the rare undergraduate who can say they spent their vacation building a third-generation synchrotron, but that’s exactly what Seno Rekawa did in the summer of 1991 as an intern at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. It was an auspicious start to his career. Less than five years later, he was working as a full-time engineer at Berkeley Lab and now is a regular mentor to budding high school and college engineers.
Berkeley Lab’s Center for Science and Engineering Education (CSEE), with its range of internship offerings, helps to fulfill one of the Lab’s mandates, which is to inspire and prepare this country’s next generation of scientists, engineers and technicians. This year more than 70 current and recent college students and almost 20 high school and college instructors participated in a CSEE program, working with Berkeley Lab researchers on science projects spanning from cancer research to cosmology to biofuels. (more…)
Berkeley Lab Researchers Take a Mesocale Look at Magnetic Vortex Formations
The phenomenon in ferromagnetic nanodisks of magnetic vortices – hurricanes of magnetism only a few atoms across – has generated intense interest in the high-tech community because of the potential application of these vortices in non-volatile Random Access Memory (RAM) data storage systems. New findings from scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) indicate that the road to magnetic vortex RAM might be more difficult to navigate than previously supposed, but there might be unexpected rewards as well.
In an experiment made possible by the unique X-ray beams at Berkeley Lab’s Advanced Light Source (ALS), a team of researchers led by Peter Fischer and Mi-Young Im of the Center for X-Ray Optics (CXRO), in collaboration with scientists in Japan, discovered that contrary to what was previously believed, the formation of magnetic vortices in ferromagnetic nanodisks is an asymmetric phenomenon. It is possible that this breaking of symmetry would lead to failure in a data storage device during its initialization process. (more…)
