Tony:
Not sure if this has been posted.
Adam
interactive.wsj.com
Intel Claims Chip Breakthrough Could Extend Pace of Innovation
By MOLLY WILLIAMS
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Intel Corp. said it made a research breakthrough that could sharply boost the speed of computer chips, and extend the semiconductor industry's pace of innovation for a decade.
The Santa Clara, Calif. said its researchers have built transistors for microprocessors and other logic chips that are just 20 nanometers wide, or four times wider than a single atom. The microscopic components are 30% smaller and 25% faster than transistors previously developed in Intel's labs, and nearly 1,000 times faster than transistors on the company's fastest commercial chip.
By 2007, Intel predicted the new technology would allow it to build chips with 1 billion transistors that operate at a speed of 20 gigahertz. That compares to today's top-of-the-line Pentium 4 chip that runs at 1.7 gigahertz and has 42 million transistors.
Intel and other makers of computer chips have been racing to extend Moore's law, the observation by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore that semiconductor chips double the number of circuits roughly every 18 months. Without a major advance in manufacturing technology, some researchers have hypothesized that the pace of innovation could begin to slow by 2005.
Transistors, which act like switches controlling the flow of electrons inside chips, are fundamental to improving chip speeds. Intel said its new transistors switch on and off 1.5 trillion times a second, or 15 billion times faster than an airplane propeller rotates.
Intel doesn't expect to be able to make such transistors in high volume for six years, and that will require the use of a radically different production process called extreme ultraviolet lithography. But the company expressed confidence that it can now extend Moore's law for 10 more years.
"From a research perspective, we are trying to figure out where Moore's Law ends," said Gerry Marcyk, director of the components research lab at Intel. "We have not yet found a fundamental limitation."
International Business Machines Corp. on Friday announced what it also termed a breakthrough in semiconductor technology, a new material dubbed "strained silicon" that it expects to boost chip speed by 35%. Intel, like IBM, is presenting a paper on its latest development at a technical conference in Kyoto, Japan. |
