Posted on 01/27/2007 7:51:58 AM PST by blam
Chips push through nano-barrier
New materials have had to be developed to shrink the transistors
The next milestone in the relentless pursuit of smaller, higher performance microchips has been unveiled. Chip-maker Intel has announced that it will start manufacturing processors using transistors just 45 nanometres (billionths of a metre) wide.
Shrinking the basic building blocks of microchips will make them faster and more efficient.
Computer giant IBM has also signalled its intention to start production of chips using the tiny components.
"Big Blue", which developed the transistor technology with partners Toshiba, Sony and AMD, intends to incorporate them into its chips in 2008.
Intel said it would start commercial fabrication of processors at three factories later this year.
Critical leaks
The development means the fundamental "law" that underpins the development of all microchips, known as Moore's Law, remains intact.
The proposition, articulated by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore in 1965, states that the number of transistors on a chip could double every 24 months.
The new Intel processors, codenamed Penryn, will pack more than four hundred million transistors into a chip half the size of a postage stamp.
Like current processors, they will come in dual-core and quad-core versions, meaning they will have two or four separate processors on each chip. The company has not said how fast the new devices will run.
The production of 45nm technology has been the goal of chip manufacturers ever since they conquered 65nm transistors.
A transistor is a basic electronic switch. Every chip needs a certain number of them, and the more there are and the faster they can switch, the more calculations chips can do.
For more than 45 years, chip manufacturers have managed to keep up with Moore's Law, shrinking transistor size and packing more and more of them on to chips.
However, past the 65nm barrier the silicon used to manufacture critical elements of the switches known as gate dielectrics no longer performs as it does at larger scales.
As a result, currents passing through the transistors leak and reduce the effectiveness of the chip.
To prevent this, researchers have had to develop new materials to contain the current at such small scales. The class of silicon substitutes are known as high-k metals.
Same 'tools'
Their development and integration into working components was described by Gordon Moore as "the biggest change in transistor technology" since the late 1960s.
The first working chips to incorporate 45nm devices were demonstrated last year by Intel, but they have never been incorporated into commercial products.
Dr Tze-chiang Chen, vice president of science and technology at IBM Research, said: "Until now, the chip industry was facing a major roadblock in terms of how far we could push current technology.
"After more than 10 years of effort, we now have a way forward."
The exact recipes for the different high-k metals used by Intel and IBM have not been disclosed, but importantly both firms have said that they could be incorporated into current production technology with minimal effort.
Ping.
Now they are using carbon nanotubes as interlayer connections.We've been blessed to be part of this industry.
From the Washington Post:
Moore's Law seen extended in chip breakthrough<.a>
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SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Intel Corp. and IBM have announced one of the biggest advances in transistors in four decades, overcoming a frustrating obstacle by ensuring microchips can get even smaller and more powerful.
The breakthrough, achieved via separate research efforts and announced on Friday, involves using an exotic new material to make transistors -- the tiny switches that are the building blocks of microchips.
The technology involves a layer of material that regulates the flow of electricity through transistors.
"At the transistor level, we haven't changed the basic materials since the 1960s. So it's a real big breakthrough," said Dan Hutcheson, head of VLSI Research, an industry consultancy.
"Moore's Law was coming to a grinding halt," he added, referring to the industry maxim laid down by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore that the number of transistors on a chip doubles roughly every two years.
The result of Moore's Law has been smaller and faster chips and their spread into a wide array of consumer products that now account for the bulk of the industry's $250 billion in annual sales.
The latest breakthrough means Intel, IBM and others can proceed with technology roadmaps that call for the next generation of chips to be made with circuitry as small as 45 nanometers, about 1/2000th the width of a human hair.
Intel said it will use the technology, based on a silvery metal called hafnium, in new processors coming out later this year that the company hopes will give it a leg up on chips from rival Advanced Micro Devices Inc.
I still like the idea of the entire interior of the planet of the Krill being one gigantic computer powered by all sorts of large moving parts.
Next step beyond, awesome.
This is why I think Intel is a better buy than AMD. Historically, Intel has been the leader in this industry. AMD is a follower.
Not that that's bad, assuming you give them an appropriate discount, but the upside potential is really with Intel, I think, particularly since it's coming out of a bad couple of years in its competition with AMD.
Bipolar Circuits and Technology Meeting, 1991., Proceedings of the 1991
But I was working on the other end of things....
Just found this:
COMPUTER HISTORY
History for 1990 - 2000
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Just amazing........
1993 ........................Fifty World Wide Web servers are known to exist as of January.
Thanks for the picture.....looks like my workstation ....back then....
Wow. Now my cell phone will shrink to the size of a Chiclet and I won't be able to find it in my hand bag.
The continuous march of progress (and decreasing cost/function) in the semiconductor industry never ceases to awe me. Too bad the auto industry never applied "design to cost" or the "economic learning curve"...
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The chip industry is changing the recipe for its transistors to continue improving performance for another generation.
For almost 40 years, chipmakers have been building transistor gates--the basic switch in a transistor--out of silicon. But Intel, IBM and Advanced Micro Devices now plan to introduce new materials for transistor gates that significantly cut power leakage while dramatically improving performance, company executives said this week in separate announcements.
Silicon Valley will not have to be renamed, as silicon remains the basic material for the chip and that's not changing anytime soon. However, the gates themselves will now be made out of metal, and a thin layer that sits between the gate and the rest of the transistor--called a gate oxide--will also use a different building block.
"When you've been using silicon dioxide and polysilicon gates for 40 years and make that jump to a different set of materials, and surpass that performance, it's quite an achievement," said Mark Bohr, an Intel senior fellow and director of the company's advanced transistor research.
Intel plans to use the materials in its Penryn family of chips scheduled for introduction later this year and built with Intel's 45-nanometer manufacturing technology. It demonstrated systems running on those chips on Thursday for a group of reporters and analysts.
"This really speaks to the level of maturity that we've now gotten from the process," said Intel CEO Paul Otellini, during a briefing for reporters at Intel's headquarters in Santa Clara, Calif. "When they first described this to me, as a layman, I thought, 'this couldn't possibly work.' And you've seen what they've done," he said, gesturing at a row of servers and desktops running the 45-nanometer Penryn family of chips with the new transistor technology.
IBM and AMD also plan to use metal gates and high-k gate oxides when they are ready to start building chips using 45-nanometer technology in 2008, said Bernie Meyerson, chief technology officer of IBM's chip group. (A material designated as "high-k" means it can hold more electrical charge than other materials.) IBM and AMD have an agreement to collaborate on research into future chipmaking techniques. The two companies also worked on the advance with Toshiba and Sony, IBM's partners on the Cell processor inside the Playstation 3.
"For us, it's an extraordinary time. This is an enormous departure from the previous history," Meyerson said. IBM has chips running in its manufacturing plants using the new transistors, he said.
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The enormously expensive chipmaking process means that companies tend to stick with materials they know, said Dan Hutcheson, president of VLSI Research. Finding new materials that can control leakage, operate faster than the older materials and endure repeated manufacturing by the millions is quite a challenge.
"We haven't changed a material in the transistor since the '60s," Hutcheson said.
Switching to a combination of metal gates and high-k dielectrics appears to be the answer to controlling leakage and keeping Moore's Law alive. High-k dielectrics can be made thicker than silicon dioxide dielectrics, decreasing current leakage and giving chip designers another couple of generations in which they can continue to make transistors smaller.
"You've taken what was a layer too thin to scale, and made a layer whose electrical properties are what you need, but the difference is it's vastly thicker," IBM's Meyerson said. "You can then scale this into the future."
But high-k materials can't really be used with conventional silicon gates, Intel's Bohr said. The silicon gate wouldn't be able to switch between states as quickly as usual because of problems in the interaction between the silicon gate and the high-k dielectric. So, Intel identified metals that it can use for both positive and negative transistors to solve that problem and make sure the gates continue to switch very quickly. IBM and AMD will likewise use metal gates with the new dielectrics, Meyerson said.
The exact combination of the metals and the high-k gate dielectric is key, Bohr said. The dielectric is based on the element hafnium, but he declined to specify the exact recipe used to build the new transistors. "Identifying the right combination is a very significant accomplishment, and we're not going to give that away for free," he said.
IBM also declined to comment on the specific nature of its high-k material, but it has published research in the past about using hafnium for this purpose, Meyerson said.
Intel first used the combination of metal gates and high-k dielectrics on the test SRAM (static RAM) chips it built using its 45-nanometer technology, Bohr said. The dielectric must be built using atomic-layer deposition, he said, meaning that a machine must deposit the dielectric one atomic layer--the width of a single atom--at a time.
The companies diverge, however, when it comes to the methods they will use to build these transistors. IBM and AMD plan to use a technique called immersion lithography, in which the lines on the chip are etched while it is immersed in purified water. Intel is sticking with its current techniques, but might consider using immersion lithography for its 32-nanometer chips, Bohr said. Likewise, Intel will continue using its 193-nanometer dry lithography tools, bucking a trend toward immersion lithography pursued by companies like IBM and Advanced Micro Devices.
I use to be a 150mm polishing machine. LOL
IBM and AMD partner on technology development. Ever heard of East Fishkill, NY? AMD engineers work alongside IBM engineers.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&client=opera&rls=en&hs=4tV&q=amd+ibm+45+nm&btnG=Search
In the end the customers like a duopoly and will buy products from both to keep prices down. Excess capacity and the cost that goes along with it will hurt Intel in the near term. The excess capacity is driven by the change from a monolopy to a duopoly and 45nm technology.
See these:
I suspect that IBM will ultimately acquire AMD. But in the meantime, AMD is in for a string of losses, I think.
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The move from 65nm to 45nm provides Intel with the above tools to work with in order to both improve performance and decrease power consumption.
Along with the typical die shrink alterations in the move to 45nm, Intel is offering more details on the new High-k + Metal gate transistor design that will begin on the 45nm technology.
The details are complex but the basic premise is higher frequencies, smaller transistors and higher density while lowering electrical leakage and maintaining a reliable manufacturer process.
Intel also mentioned that Penryn will have 410 million transistors on a dual core processor compared to the 290 million or so on a Conroe. The majority of these extra transistors will be in the form of cache though some are for the addition of SSE4 instructions; look for 8MB L2 to be the new standard per core.
The Intel manufacturing division is running ahead of schedule as well with two fabrication facilities in the US operational at 45nm by the end of the year and another in Israel in 2008.
I'll leave you with this shot of the Intel fab worker holding up what could be the first manufacurered 45nm Penryn processors.
Final Thoughts
I won't dive head first into the extreme technical information that Intel provided today but even the non-technical readers should be excited about this news. A healthy 45nm ramp up for Intel means that performance and performance-per-watt can continue on the upward march we saw with the introduction of the Conroe processor last year. Intel definitely has the lead in process technology over AMD but hopefully the boys in green will be able to compete and keep things interesting at the end of 2007 and into 2008.
It's going to be an interesting year!
Note: on the next page I have included a set of slides provided by Intel for anyone looking for more information on the 45nm High-k + Metal gate technology they talked about today. Enjoy!
Updates above......
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