Introduction: History and Perspectives of Rapid Thermal Processing

Today, ULSI (ultra large scale integration) in silicon-based mass-produced integrated circuits (ICs) has its state-of-the-art representatives in microprocessors such as Intel’s Pentium or, even more powerful, the PowerPC, jointly designed by Apple, IBM and Motorola. Both products were originally designed in a 0.5 pm, 3.3 Volt CMOS (complimentary metal oxide semiconductor) technology. The Power PC contains 3.6 million transistors onto a chip, measuring 196 mm2 [1]. In the course of 1995 the line width has been further reduced to 0.35 pm for the development of processors with some 5 metal levels, such as the Pentium Pro (or P6) processor, as part of a series of continuously shrinking microelectronics, which started after the first planar single transistor in 1959 [2].