SemiSerious

EETimes announced yesterday an Apple patent application describing a touch screen control system. Fans of Apple products (myself included) are excited by the prospect of a whole new breed of devices that could incorporate a touch screen interface. The iPhone is the only product Apple has announced and shown to have this type of interface. Of course many will remember that Apple’s Newton - the world’s first PDA - employed a touch screen.

Although touch screen information displays abound, Apple seems to have recognized the utility of a truly tactile interaction using human fingers as opposed to a stylus. Those like myself too lazy to extract a stylus from its holder find our cell phone or PDA screens forever sullied by dirty, greasy fingerprints. The iPhone will face this dilemma, but next generation iPods will keep sticky fingers off the information display. The touch screen will handle only the inputs while the control menus, clickwheels or other navigable GUI’s will appear on the information display. I like to use my fingers but also like a clean screen, so I think this is a great idea.

The application, the Antone Gonsalves article and tens or hundreds of speculators do a great deal to spark interest in future possibilities from Cupertino. This all sounds like typical Apple buzz from spin master, Steve Jobs. And that’s good because the application, if granted, could face challenges. The first hurdle for any invention is the “obviousness” test. Apple’s application claims:

A method for operating a hand-held electronic device, comprising: displaying first information on a display element on a first surface of a hand-held electronic device; displaying control elements and a cursor on the display element when the electronic device is in a specified state; adjusting a display position of the cursor in response to a contact on a force-sensitive touch-surface on a second surface of the electronic device, the second surface being a different surface than the first surface; and activating a function associated with a first displayed control element when the cursor is positioned coincident with the first displayed control element and an activation force is applied to the force-sensitive touch-surface at a position corresponding to the cursor.

The long and short of this appears to be the marriage of an information display (presently well known) and a touch screen for human interaction (also well known). Putting two previously known inventions together could open this patent up to attacks based on obviousness. Whether the USPTO grants a patent for this or not, Apple will have accomplished a lot by generating an avalanche of speculation on touch screen iPods, MacBooks, iPhones and other goodies to look forward to well in advance of showing us any prototypes.

With the VLSI Syymposia just a little over a month away, I will wrap up my picks for papers to watch for by looking at DRAM. For the Technology Symposium, Samsung is over-represented with five out of the seven presentations split between two sessions.

Two of Samsung’s articles will discuss aspects of their FinFET DRAM cell, touted as the enabler for sub-50nm devices. The second paper appears to provide more details of the process and cell performance. If enough details are provided at the conference, it could be enough to predict Samsung as the first to make it to production with a FinFET device.

Qimonda is the only other vendor presenting a technology paper. In their forward-looking work, carbon is proposed as a new capacitor electrode material for DRAM. The technology includes a high-K dielectric for the trench capacitor, so Qimonda moves to carbon-based materials for better thermal stability. Qimonda’s other paper promotes trench technology beyond 40nm with a discussion of an array transistor that is self-aligned to the trench.

But the best paper for insight into production technology is provided in the final DRAM paper. Samsung announces it’s 56nm, 1Gb technology patterned on an ArF immersion tool. A 0.19 square micron cell size is reported. To achieve this scaled cell, Samsung moves to an elevated source / drain structure for the first time. Micron has used a similar structure for a few generations now. The capacitor dielectric is “ZAZ” which is a sandwich of zirconium and aluminum oxides for increased K value. Based on some work shown by Kinam Kim at IEDM 2005, I expect that the higher aspect ration capacitors at 56nm could use the Samsung “MESH-CAP” design for mechanical stability.

In yet another article, Samsung talks about hafnium dielectrics for DRAM. Of course, we have already seen this used in capacitors, but this work describes hafnium in a HfSiON dielectric for the access transistor.

Samsung is the DRAM dominator, and they lead this conference along with many others in presenting their technology developments. Unfortunately, I will not have a chance to see any of these papers first hand, but my good friend and colleague, Ramesh Kuchibatla will be in Kyoto and provide both scoops and scams he discovers at the event.