Posted on 12/07/2005 11:11:53 AM PST by nickcarraway
The chip giant wants to use new materials for building chips that would boost processing speed by 50 percent. December 6, 2005
Intel said Tuesday it’s developing a transistor technology that could increase processing speed by 50 percent while using one-tenth the power needed by transistors in an Intel chip on the market today.
The chip, which would use new materials allowing electronics to travel faster through transistors, may become the foundation for chips a decade from now, the world’s largest chip maker said. The company plans to detail its research in a conference in Washington, D.C., Wednesday.
Researchers at the chip giant and QinetiQ, based in the United Kingdom, have worked about three years on the project to create a prototype transistor that would improve chip performance while using less energy.
“We are excited about the result,” said Rob Willoner, technology analyst at Intel’s technology and manufacturing group. “People have insatiable appetite for more performance. And the power reduction is also really significant.”
Transistors are the building blocks of a chip, or an integrated circuit. The more transistors are packed on a piece of silicon, the faster and more powerful is the integrated circuit. Intel and the entire chip industry has been pursuing Moore’s Law¯named after Intel co-founder Gordon Moore¯that predicts the possibility of doubling the number of transistors on a chip every year.
But shrinking and packing on more transistors, the traditional way of improving chip performance, has led to electricity current leakage problems. The leakage would make the chip run hot and malfunction.
Intel and other chip companies, including Advanced Micro Devices and IBM, are studying new materials and designs that would reduce power use while still improving performance.
Suman Datta, a senior researcher at Intel, will present a technical paper on the transistor project at the IEEE International Electron Devices Meeting in Washington, D.C.
New Materials
The prototype transistor uses different materials than transistors in most chips today. Currently, silicon is the dominant material for making semiconductors.
But to achieve high performance and energy efficiency, researchers used indium antimonide for the channel portion of the transistor. The compound is made of indium and antimony, and it allows electronics to travel faster through transistors.
The channel is the space through which electronics travel from one end of a transistor to another. An integrated circuit in your computer, for example, is active when electricity runs through the millions of transistors on a chip.
Intel and QinetiQ are working on ensuring that other components of the transistors would still be made of silicon because the material is so widely used now. To replace silicon completely would require a dramatic and costly change in manufacturing technology.
Technical Challenges
Using both silicon and indium antimonide to build a transistor presents a technical challenge for researchers. The atomic structure of silicon is quite different than the one for indium antimonide. The difference means the two materials don’t fit well together, and a thin layer of buffer would be added to connect the two, Mr. Willoner said.
The prototype transistor is built on a gallium arsenide base instead of a silicon base. Gallium arsenide is used for making some communications chips today but it’s expensive.
Intel hopes to make chips with the indium antimonide transistors 10 years from now. The chip giant discussed the research in February.
But at the technical conference on Wednesday, Mr. Datta will showcase improvements he and other researchers have made to the transistor design, including a narrower channel (85 nanometers) than the one it featured earlier this year (200 nanometers).
Intel Announces Chip Technology Breakthrough Using New Materials
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Posted on 12/07/2005 8:21:36 AM PST by BenLurkin
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