Pulsed laser deposition at wafer level is a game changer

eetimes.com

63 points·jnord··7 comments

Does this help with compute, or just MEMS and radio?

I think it’s more for MEMS and RF applications. These techniques don’t have enough conformality for modern fin and nanosheet based transistor logic.

PLD is currently required for deposited materials that have, for example, high Faraday rotation (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faraday_effect)

These are types of important material properties for the future of compute if we are to use light based computation. E.g. how can one make a medium for light to only propagate one direction.

Not sure about compute. But

> Achieving higher scandium concentrations in aluminum nitride films can help increase RF filter performance. Pulsed laser deposition can take the scandium concentration in the film to at least 40%, up from the previous 30% limit

The first thing that came to mind when reading this was RF synthetic aperture performance for jamming-resistant directional antennas in military applications. These seemingly incremental improvements can have huge real world consequences.

Imagine the Starlink antenna but with 10x the performance, or a radar that can withstand 10x the jamming or hide completely because it needs 10% the power. I wonder if that's what's possible here.

(correction: phased array, not synthetic aperture)

Like everything in the last 20 years (silicon photonics, graphene, spintronics,...) "it promises to one day revolutionize computing" (a day that never comes !)

I thought there was a hn article about intel's just announced silicon photonics product:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40812465

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