Fixing masks with lasers
Plugged into the future
Pattern of deception
Bettering ram
Embracing small change
Supermarket in your palm
More wheat, less chaff
Transistors go plastic
A smartcard that won't blab
Fixing masks with lasers
IBM scientists have helped zap away a problem that has long 
plagued the microchip industry. The photolithographic masks used to define the features of integrated circuits must be free of defects, yet the structures are so delicate and tiny -- just four or five times the size of the chips themselves -- that efforts to remove flaws often cause damage. Repairing the $10,000 masks can be risky, but researchers at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center and at IBM's Microelectronics Division have devised a safe repair technique using ultrafast laser pulses.
A mask consists of a transparent quartz substrate on which micron-wide lines of chromium are deposited. A spot too much chromium here or there -- which is practically unavoidable -- can result in defective chips, and so must be removed. The two standard repair methods have serious drawbacks. While a focused beam of positive ions (charged particles) can blast away unwanted chrome, the ions contaminate the quartz substrate, reducing its transparency. The other, older method uses pulses of laser light lasting a few billionths of a second. Unfortunately, that is enough time for the laser to heat and damage the surrounding area.
The new IBM method, however, uses laser pulses a million times shorter -- lasting only a few femtoseconds (quadrillionths of a second) -- too fast to cause any significant heat damage. To produce a rectangular spot that is ideal for repairing mask lines, the IBM system first illuminates a variable-sized rectangular aperture with the laser light and then focuses the resulting spot through the objective lens of a microscope onto the mask. In the process, the spot size is reduced 100-fold, allowing defects as small as half a micron to be cleanly repaired. The new tool is now successfully operating at IBM's mask house in Burlington, Vermont.
Plugged into the future
IBM got a jump on building the next
generation of Internet tools in February when it became the first company to connect to the new high-performance network of the nation's leading research universities. The network, known as
Abilene, is coordinated
by the University Corporation for Advanced Internet
Development (UCAID) and is designed to link companies and universities that are working on Internet2, another UCAID project.
Internet2 is a joint effort to create advanced Internet applications -- including telemedicine, digital libraries and virtual laboratories -- that require greater speed, bandwidth and reliability than are possible using today's Internet technology. The Abilene network serves as the backbone for developing such applications.
IBM Research, which is participating in both Abilene and Internet2, intends to adapt the advanced technologies that emerge to e-business and other commercial uses. The technologies will include new middleware to manage traffic over high-speed networks and bandwidth-hungry applications that will integrate video, voice, data and transactions.
Pattern of deception
A pattern-finding computer algorithm developed at IBM's Thomas J.
Watson Research Center to help biologists discover new proteins and analyze DNA has been applied by scientists at the Zurich Research Laboratory to uncover hackers. In its use as an anti-intrusion tool, the program, known as Teiresias, looks for patterns in the vast amounts of data a computer generates as it executes routine instructions over the course of hundreds of hours. That's the computer's signature. Attempts at hacking disrupt the signature, raising a red flag. In the lab, the tool has detected all the hacks that researchers have thrown at it. If field tests pan out, those responsible for computer security will have a powerful new technique at their disposal.
www.research.ibm.com/topics/popups/deep/math/html/teiresias.html
Bettering ram
An experimental memory technology
known as magnetic random-access memory (MRAM) is progressing by leaps and bounds. 
An MRAM device consists of layers of magnetic material separated by thin nonmagnetic layers through which electrons can tunnel. Such a device exhibits two distinct magnetic states, equivalent to 0 and 1. The state, which is switched by currents through wires above and below the device, can be read by measuring the magnitude of the tunneling current. If perfected, such devices could provide both the high speed of today's static RAM and the high density of dynamic RAM. An IBM Research team has made critical improvements to the underlying technology, which has been under development for several years. At the American Physical Society Centennial Meeting in March, IBM physicist Stuart Parkin announced the ability to create tunnel junctions with nearly identical operating characteristics, a requisite for practical devices; a 10-million-fold reduction in re
sistance, enabling smaller
feature sizes and higher chip density; higher signal strength, permitting more flexibility in circuit design; greater thermal stability; and reading and writing times as short as 10 nanoseconds, some six times faster than today's fastest dynamic RAM
memory.
Embracing small change
E-commerce may be where the big bucks are, but some
online merchants will get there by repeatedly going after small change. This is especially true of businesses that sell text, images, video sequences or various Internet services priced at a few dollars or less. A new "micro payment" system from IBM and the German information technology company Atos can help merchants extract these small amounts quickly and securely. Called POSEIDON MP, it runs on the seller's IBM RS/6000® computer or Windows NT® machine. Under POSEIDON, an online customer who has a Java-compatible browser receives a Micro Payment Wallet. This allows the customer to make and confirm purchases using an electronic signature. A Micro Payment Merchant Server then securely processes the payment.
Supermarket in your palm
Shopping-cart gridlock and long checkout lines are a thing of the past
for many customers of the U.K.'s Safeway supermarkets. A system called Easi-Order, developed jointly by Safeway and IBM Research, lets customers transmit their shopping list using a handheld personal digital assistant. Store clerks do the rest.
The supermarket sends the customer's PDA an individually tailored list based on past purchases. The customer can then select items from the list, specify a pickup time, and phone in the order using a modem. Meanwhile, the PDA downloads personalized offers, suggestions and recipes from the market's server. Such personalization is made possible by data-mining technology developed at Research, which also designed the software to manage the flow of data between server and PDAs. IBM sees mobile consumer technologies like Easi-Order as a key part of its growing pervasive-computing effort (see "Seeing the Light: IBM's vision of life beyond the PC," page 10).
Safeway predicts even greater convenience over the next few years. Customers could order groceries using TV sets or cell phones, and might even add items to their shopping lists by scanning the bar codes of household items.
More wheat, less chaff
One of the universal frustrations of
using the Web could soon disappear, thanks to search technology created at IBM Research. In response to a query, search engines typically return a slew of marginal pages along with a few useful ones. But a search algorithm called Clever, under development at the Almaden Research Center, is designed to home in on the most relevant information.
Clever is based on an algorithm called HITS (Hypertext-Induced Topic Search), which tries to identify either authoritative sites or hubs (lists of authoritative links). HITS begins with a "root set" of pages returned by a standard search engine in response to a query. Next, it studies the links both to and from the pages in the root set. Pages to which many other sites are linked are deemed authoritative, while pages that link to many authoritative sites are presumed to be useful compilations.
To boost accuracy further, the new algorithms augment HITS with the ability to examine the text and other features of a page. User trials have shown that Clever's combination of search technologies can yield results that are at least as useful as those produced by Yahoo!®, in which sites are chosen and grouped by human beings.
More information: Clever site.
Transistors go plastic
In theoretical physics, it has been said,
the mark of understanding is to be able to explain your idea to a child; in technology, one might argue, comparable mastery is the ability to make something out of plastic. IBM researchers have now found a way to do that with transistors. Specifically, they have fabricated organic transistors on a transparent plastic substrate using a room-temperature process.
While not the first organic transistors, the ones being developed by a team led by Christos Dimitrakopoulos at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center are the first to work at voltages low enough for practical use while matching the performance of transistors made of amorphous silicon, currently used in flat-panel displays. The secret is an insulator made of barium zirconate titanate (BZT) instead of the standard silicon dioxide. The transistors are formed by laying down on the plastic a metal gate electrode, covered by a BZT gate insulator. A thin film of the organic semiconductor pentacene is then deposited on top of it, followed by deposition of gold source and drain electrodes. Eventually, the transistors could replace those made of amorphous silicon, resulting in nonbrittle, lightweight and flexible flat-panel displays.
A smartcard that won't blab
Smartcards -- plastic cards with processors and memories
embedded in them -- have been proposed for all sorts of uses, such as banking, electronic cash, medical records and customer loyalty programs. Combining functions on a single card would provide obvious convenience, yet it poses security concerns: you don't necessarily want a loan officer to be able to read your medical history or a merchant to know you have an account with a competitor. New multifunction cards being developed jointly by IBM Research and Philips Semiconductors are designed to keep private information private.
The card's security features are built into both software and hardware. On the software side, a group at IBM Research is designing a highly secure operating system that
keeps different application programs separate, preventing them from tapping one another's data. On the hardware side, Philips Semiconductors' SmartXA smartcard processor separates user and system modes and provides special memory protection.
Besides offering unprecedented security, the new smartcard is designed to run a wide variety of applications from different sources. It will be the first card capable of running programs written in different languages. Thanks to the 16-bit SmartXA processor, which provides some 30 times the performance of today's 8-bit smartcard processors, the card will be able to run Java -- the popular cross-platform language -- quickly and efficiently. IBM Research is designing the JavaCard virtual machine that will enable the card to run Java programs.
