Nanotechnology Evolution
Technology Manufacturing has Evolved
Over the last decade, the term “nano” has become synonymous with any sort of microelectronics. We’ve come a long way since I first began working with a major semiconductor manufacturer in the late 1970’s. Then “micro” was typically 1 micron geometry range of one millionth of a meter line width – or the equivalent of (list something in terms of what a non-techno person can understand…a human hair, end of a safety pin, etc).
Then in the late 1980’s as cell phones, cars and other electronics demanded increasingly smaller memory chips to enable more speed, memory and better performance, we began to work on technologies in the sub-micron range (can you put this in more pedestrian terms?). I clearly remember the competition among the semiconductor manufacturers about who would break the boundary of 32-bit megahertz to gigahertz.
In the early 2000s, after the first 64-bit processor named Alpha was released and renamed the Pentium 4 microprocessor, we began to live up to Moore’s Law which drove the industry to double performance every 18 months. It was then that we brought the technology to a whole new level, bringing the nano level technology to the one billionth of a meter. This required taking the technology to a whole new area of product development.
