What is the most challenging aspect of this radical new technology?
At this moment, it appears that the biggest challenge will be to produce significant portions of a (5 5 12) or other (1 1 X) wafer that are perfectly atomically flat. This difficulty is due to the fact that a particular crystal orientation of a wafer is rarely more precise than about 0.1, and it needs to be precise to 0.01 to have even a 1m wide atomically flat region (REF 14). Even more serious is the fact that even the best-aligned chem-mechanical polishing (CMP) process does not produce atomically flat wafers on a local scale (see Refs. 1, 12-14), and these localized regions will be in random locations. The pending patent addresses this problem by a technology that forces the perfect orientations to be in precise locations where the critical regions of the devices are to be placed. There are several variants of this general concept covered in a recent Provisional Patent. The important point is that it can be done in a production process. This certainly has application in the IC appl
