NEC Corp is using its SX family supercomputers to analyse the capacitive film that is an inherent layer in the production process of high capacity memory chips, and reckons that its better insight into the material will enable it to lay down films sufficiently thin for the fabrication of 256M-bit and 1G-bit memory chips – and the physics is daunting because the film needs to be no more than 70 Angstroms thick for 4M-bit chips, and 50 Angstroms is currently regarded as the limit: NEC says that using its new technique, it has already discovered that its film contains too much Silicon to get the required thinness.
