re: INTC - Wireless - "Radio Free Silicon" - Expanding Moore's Law
Kicking Pat (CTO at Intel) outlines futures
>> Intel To Put Silicon Radio Into CPUs, Chipsets
Mike Magee
The Inquirer
28/02/2002
theinquirer.net
Pat Gelsinger, the chief techology officer at Intel, told the forum here in San Francisco today that the firm's aim was to shrink radio into silicon and that meant both chipsets and CPUs would integrate wireless.
Dubbed "Radio Free Silicon", the technology would drive the cost of wireless down to the point where it was essentially free, although whether the networks such devices might use are free or not is a different kettle of fish.
The silicon radio on a CPU may arrive sooner than other technologies he talked about today - earlier in the work Louis Burns said at his keynote that integrated wireless was not so far away.
Gelsinger said today: "We want to put a CMOS radio directly integrated into the core of the die." Chipsets would be developed which also included silicon radios and could access personal area networks, local area networks and wide area networks.
Gelsinger's keynote speech, called Expanding Moore's Law, was designed to show off future technologies Intel is developing across a wide spectrum including optical switching, ad hoc sensor networks and micro electro mechanical systems (MEMS).
To get to the goals Gelsinger is suggesting, Moore's Law is being somewhat modified from the silicon oxide based model which surely is nearing the end of the road.
Gelsinger, however, said that in a modified form, and quite probably using different materials Moore's Law would continue for decades.
"There is no end to Moore's Law, it will still be around when I retire," he claimed.
Gelsinger said that some of the problems of scaling CPUs would be solved by the Terahertz transistors it is working on - these could being process technology down to 15 or 20 nanometres, and avoided some of the problems of silicon dioxide based semiconductors.
He also said that different ideas in packaging - such as bumpless build up technology - would allow the integration of dies into packages and helped inductance and capacitance.
Intel was also continuing to help the consortium developing extreme ultraviolet lithography, which was likely to produce results towards the second half of this decade.
The firm was developing MEMS which could include devices for switching in silicon, and Intel also has ambitious plans to shrink passive components into silicon wafers. He showed two wafers that the Intel Labs have created and said the goal was to produce mobile phones which could be the size of an earring, or microphones which could be the size of button shirts.
Intel is close to productising intelligent roaming, which allows notebook PCs to pick, choose and automatically switch between networks as people are moving from place to place.
Gelsinger revealed Intel is working on a so-called optiprocessor, which could use photonics and other optical technology to act as fast intelligent switches with the logic on a semiconductor connecting to another chip using fibre cable.
Currently such optical switches cost tens of thousands and dollars but Intel could significantly reduce that cost, he said.
Gelsinger acknowledged that there were some challenges in each of these ideas but he maintained that they were engineering problems rather than fundamental problems with the technology. <<
- Eric - |
