14 DAY TRIAL // The press has been going on and on about Intel's new CPUs and their new transistors, but few people have been interested in learning just how the company came up with them.
The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers did look into it though. In fact, IEEE reached the conclusion that the two engineers behind the invention, and many others, should be honored.
IEEE will hold a symposium on VLSI Technology in Honolulu, Hawaii, on June 12, 2012.
There, it will present Yan Borodovsky and Sam Sivakumar with the 2012 IEEE Cledo Brunetti Award, “for contributions to developing and implementing innovative lithographic and patterning equipment and processes to enable cost-effective scaling for logic technologies.”
Yan Borodovsky, in addition to being an IEEE member, is an Intel Senior Fellow with one Intel Achievement Award and 20 patents to his name.
He has a master's degree in solid-state devices and physics, earned at the Polytechnic Institute, Tula, Russia. He's worked at Intel's Hillsboro, Oregon facilities since 1987 and is currently director of advanced lithography.
Meanwhile, Intel Fellow Sam Sivakumar has three Intel Achievement Awards, 33 patents and a degree in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He's been with Intel since 1990 and accumulated those 33 patents between then and now.
Why is all this relevant? Because Borodovsky and Sivakumar are the ones responsible for the biggest Intel CPU technological leaps, even the development of Intel's first 45 nanometer lithography process, back in 2007.
Double patterning was used to make a regular layout of unidirectional lines, extending 193-nm dry lithography and accelerating the commercialization of 45nm CPUs (Intel Core i7/i5 Lynnfield and Clarksfield, Pentium Wolfdale, Diamondville, Atom Pineview).
Their immersion lithography later enabled the 32nm generation (the Sandy Bridge Core i3 and Core i5 CPUs from 2010) and, finally, the 22nm Ivy Bridge CPUs with Tri-Gate 3D transistors (go here for more details on what those things actually are).
The abridged definition of Lithography (in our case microlithography/nanolithography) is the use of light to transfer integrated circuit patterns onto semiconductor materials during microfabrication/nanofabrication.
Originally, the word was used to describe a printing book method reliant on a stone or smooth metal plate. Bavarian author Alois Senefelder invented it in 1796 as a cheap method for publishing theatrical works. Needless to say, the idea has come far since then.
UPDATE (24 June): Added a clarification: the award was given for the development and implementation of innovative lithographic and patterning equipment and processes, not for 3D Transistors per se (those are just the most recent Intel invention).