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Below about 50 nm feature sizes, it appears that a completely new device fabrication technology is needed.
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Progress in electron beams and X-rays, which were the leading candidates of a few years ago, has stalled.
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No one yet has any good idea how to scale e-beam lithography to economical production, and X-rays seem to destroy everything in their path, including the masks and devices. If something does eventually materialize along these lines, it won't be easy.
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The researchers I spoke with nonetheless agree that future devices will be electronic for the foreseeable future.
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As Stan Williams of HP points out, electrons are the ideal basis for device technology because they have basically zero size and mass, can travel at large fractions of the speed of light and interact strongly with matter.
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