Is this the type of technology that DELL will have access to under its agreement with IBM? If so, this puts DELL in an EXCELLENT position.
Fez
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IBM to Introduce Breakthrough in Chip Technology
Henry Norr, Chronicle Staff Writer Thursday, December 2, 1999
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IBM is set to unveil a series of advances in chip design and materials that it said will keep ``Moore's law' on the books for at least another decade.
The oft-repeated industry maxim, originally coined in 1965 by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore, holds that the capabilities of semiconductors double roughly every 18 to 24 months. Intel and most other industry leaders believe they can sustain that rate of advance for at least 10 or 15 years, but acknowledge that doing so will require solutions to some daunting technical challenges.
In 18 papers to be presented starting Monday at a Washington, D.C., conference called the International Electron Device Meeting, IBM will disclose its solutions to several of those problems. The techniques are ready for production, according to the company, and products incorporating them should be available for purchase in a year or two.
``Clearly, a lot of what was pie-in-the-sky research at IBM has been applied to real products in the last 24 months,' said Rick Doherty, president of the Envisioneering Group, a technology research and consulting company.
``If you look at their technical papers and patents, they're rolling out technical secrets faster than other semiconductor companies, even bigger ones,' he said. Doherty credited IBM CEO Lou Gerstner for pushing his vaunted research staff to get more involved in product development.
The innovations to be disclosed next week fall into three main areas, according to Bijan Davari, vice president of research and development at IBM Microelectronics.
-- One topic is a design approach called SOI, for ``silicon on insulator,' which IBM first announced a year ago but is only now ready to introduce into production. By itself, Davari said, SOI improves performance by 30 to 35 percent compared to previous technology; when it's combined with another recent IBM advance, the use of copper instead of aluminum for the tiny wires inside the chip, the improvement increases to 50 percent, he said.
Alternatively, product developers can use the new technologies to get the same processing performance they do now, but with only a half to a quarter as much power. Reducing power requirements reduces the amount of heat the chips generate in operation.
That's a significant benefit of the new IBM techniques, Envisioneering analyst Doherty said, because more than half the chips manufactured worldwide now go into what he called ``heat-conscious devices.' That category includes not only mobile products like cell phones and notebook computers, but also large hubs and switches used to manage Internet traffic, which now operate at such high speeds that the heat they generate is a serious problem, he said.
The first chips combining copper and SOI, due next year, will be designed for network servers and other large computers, but eventually the combination will make its way into a variety of products, according to IBM spokesman Philip Bergman.
-- The second innovation IBM will describe is a new design for dynamic RAM that will make it possible to build large amounts of it directly into the processor chip, instead of on separate chips as current DRAM designs require.
Co-developed with German chipmaker Infineon, the new technique puts entire memory cells into trenches within the silicon layers of a chip, leaving a smooth surface for other kinds of transistors on other layers.
Because a processor can fetch data much faster from built-in memory than from separate chips, the new approach could double or triple overall performance, according to Davari.
The technique is likely to appear in a year or two, he said, in specialized chips used in hubs and routers and for high-speed graphics, but later it will make its way into the processors used in desktop PCs. In 5 to 10 years, he said, it could make a possible a dramatic simplification in processor design, which in turn would cut costs and improve performance still further.
-- IBM's third advance involves the use of a material called silicon germanium in communications chips such as those used in cell phones. Davari said the material is cheaper than the alternatives used today and makes it easier to integrate millions of transistors in one chip. The net effect will be to reduce the number of chips needed in a cell phone to 2 or 3, compared with the 8 to 12 used in most mobile phones today.
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