An exponential increase in the performance of silicon microelectronics and the demand to manufacture in great volumes has created an ecosystem that requires increasingly complex tools to fabricate and characterize the next generation of chips. However, the cost to develop and produce the next generation of these tools has also risen exponentially, to the point where the risk associated with progressing to smaller feature sizes has created pain points throughout the ecosystem. The present challenge includes shrinking the smallest features from nanometers to atoms (10 nm corresponds to 30 silicon atoms). Relaxing the requirement for achieving scalable manufacturing creates the opportunity to evaluate ideas not one or two generations into the future, but at the absolute physical limit of atoms themselves. This article describes recent advances in atomic precision advanced manufacturing (APAM) that open the possibility of exploring opportunities in digital electronics. Doing so will require advancing the complexity of APAM devices and integrating APAM with CMOS.
@article{arxiv.2002.11003,
title = {Atomic Precision Advanced Manufacturing for Digital Electronics},
author = {Daniel R. Ward and Scott W. Schmucker and Evan M. Anderson and Ezra Bussmann and Lisa Tracy and Tzu-Ming Lu and Leon N. Maurer and Andrew Baczewski and Deanna M. Campbell and Michael T. Marshall and Shashank Misra},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2002.11003},
year = {2025}
}