Everybody in the semiconductor industry knows “Moore Law”. It describes an important trend in the history of computer hardware: that the number of transistors that can be inexpensively placed on an integrated circuit (IC) is increasing exponentially, doubling approximately every two years.

While we saw a development from 240 nm structural size (the distance of the transistors in the silicon) 4 years ago to 38nm right now it is obvious that conventional semiconductor technology will not be able to be driven forward (smaller) any more due to physical restrictions it is facing.

There were mainly two ways of manufacturing ICs: the “deep trench”, that “trenches” the ICs into the silicon substrate and “stacking” that builds up the ICs in several layers on the silicon. It may have been a reason that deep trench technology, that is only used by one or two smaller semiconductor companies, is already written off, that one of those companies, Qimonda, has now declared to have done the next technology leap with a completely new design approach.

The technology called “Buried Wordline” enables the company to build memory chips (DRAMs) with structural sizes of 30 nm. The advantages of this technology among the ability to cheaper production is an enormous performance increase and a significant lower energy consumption.

Just for a comparison: a 46nm buried wordline chip enables twice number of bits on the same areal as a 58 nm trench chip.

However, although this can be seen as a technology leap, it is still conventional semiconductor memory technology, that will reach its physical frontier of miniaturization sooner or later. But there are lots of other promising approaches, like using carbon materials, nanogrids of platinum or the quantum computer. There is heavy progress also in this future technologies. Latest news have been that scientists from the University of Munich (Germany) analyzed the functionality of so called “Qubits” that are important for quantum computers. Qubits are able to adopt different states at the same time and have other characteristics that make them much more efficient memory than conventional bits.