Elmer, I saw this blurb from an EETimes article. It seems that Intel is further ahead of IBM than I had thought. This should give them a pretty huge advantage at this stage.
To date, IBM Corp. has been the main proponent of strained silicon, with a plan to add its version of strained silicon to IBM's 65-nm process node, which is expected to move to first manufacturing in 2005. IBM plans to combine its strained silicon expertise with its silicon-on-insulator capabilities. However, IBM researchers have indicated at least a 10 percent cost adder for strained silicon, and said much work remains to balance the mobility enhancement in the NMOS and PMOS portions of a CMOS device.
Dan Hutcheson, president of VLSI Research Corp. (San Jose, Calif.), said "it is pretty clear that Intel has made a major breakthrough here. It is amazing that they would use strained silicon at the 90-nm node, and if the cost adder is only 2 percent then the process additions would need to be pretty trivial."
A processed 300-mm wafer might cost $5,000 at the finished manufacturing stage, and a 2 percent increase in processing costs would amount to only $100 or so, Hutcheson noted.
eet.com
One funny thing about all this is how the 'Droids were "certain" that SOI would be the future, and that Intel was going to fall behind without it. But in reality, Intel has been pushing forward with some really cost effective techniques that give greater benefits, and meanwhile SOI has delayed AMD's .13u process farther and farther out. It looks like Intel made the right decisions, and it will be tough for AMD to catch up at this point.
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