Diffraction and Semi-Conductor Lithography

[peter.ell]

I was curious as to how semiconductor manufacturing gets around the fact that diffraction should prevent processors with transistors on the scale of tens of nanometers from being possible.

How do we get around this if the diffraction of light is a fundamental limit to how small we can do any light-based etching?

Thanks so much!

 

[MATLABdude]

It gets tougher and tougher, but the impending end of photolithography has been predicted for years on end. I'm not an expert in photolithography (especially at the low-end of size scales), but yes, there are some limiting factors:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photolithography#Resolution_in_projection_systems

The more specialized sub-wavelength and sub-diffraction limit techniques are discussed in more detail at the Wikipedia article starting with the 65 nm process technology:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/65_nanometer

Not an in-depth explanation, but hopefully a starting point.