Bell Labs boffins crack chip conundrum

Lucent Technologies' Bell Labs claims to have created a way to enable developers to eradicate faults in ever-shrinking chips.

The group says it can allow developers to look deep inside a semiconductor by creating an image of single impurity in silicon, a process which it describes as similar to "photographing a footprint on the surface of the moon" from Earth.

Being able to accurately detect faults at the atomic level is crucial in enabling scientists to continue developing faster, smaller chips.

Bell Labs uses scanning transmission electronic microscopy to view individual 'dopants', substances which produce electrical characteristics in a semiconductor, and clusters at atomic levels.

Paul Peercy, Professor and Dean of Engineering at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, told academic journal Nature that the breakthrough "will be important in increasing our understanding of a wide range of complex materials".