Boise State University unveiled a specialized machine Thursday, which will be used to develop the next generation of semiconductors.
It’s short name is an AIXTRON machine, for the German company that makes it. The long name?
“2D close coupled showerhead metal organic chemical vapor deposition tool,” explained David Estrada, Professor in Boise State’s Micron School of Materials Science and Engineering.
He said the machine can produce computer wafers as thin as one to three atoms — the cutting edge of semiconductor technology.
“These materials are candidates to replace the materials that you might find in your computer processor today,” Estrada said.
The research powered by the machine could help make computers faster, or more efficient — a critical development for the energy-hungry cloud computing industry.
Estrada said the technology could also allow researchers to compress the gap between lab-based research and real-world production. What’s called the ‘readiness scale’ assigns low numbers to basic lab research and the scale increases the closer a project gets to implementation or development at scale.
“We are trying to bridge the one-to-three and the four-to-six [readiness scale] and do this in a way that we are using industry relevant tools so that it can be easily adopted by semiconductor companies and integrate it into their process lines,” Estrada said.
That includes Boise-based Micron Technologies, which Estrada called critical in the three year process to getting an AIXTRON machine. He also credited Congressman Mike Simpson (R-Idaho) for helping secure funding for the machine through the U.S. Air Force research labs.
Academics from other research universities, as well as government scientists from NASA and the defense industry, will be in Boise as the machine is unveiled as part of this week’s National Council on Competitiveness summit at Boise State University.
Estrada said it will be about a month before the first experimental chips are produced, and he’s certainly excited. And he knows a lot of his peers are watching.
“It really is helping grow the research infrastructure at the university and put us on a national scale.”
