In the discussion about the future of integrated electronics one prognosis has become the mantra of computer chip industry, known as Moore’s Law: “The complexity for minimum component costs has increased at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year. Certainly over the short term this rate can be expected to continue, if not to increase.” This is often cited as a doubling of chip performance every eighteen months and could so far be approximately fulfilled with chip performance doubling about every 20 months.
Largely, advances in optical lithography have so far sustained this phenomenal growth rate and feature size has been pushed down to 10nm by techniques like extreme ultraviolet lithography, x-ray proximity lithography and focused electron and ion-beam techniques. But it seems that increased integration density is still the only evident concept pursued while the structure size that can be fabricated by this classical fabrication technique is already operating at the physical limit. However, fundamental physical limits and increasing technological as well as financial efforts, make new techniques relying on advances in nanotechnology seem very promising…