Intel Says in Breakthrough in Transistor Design
Source: Yahoo DailyNews
Intel Corp. (Nasdaq:INTC - news) has devised a new structure for transistors -- the tiny switches that make up semiconductors -- in a development it said could lead to microprocessors that run at blazing speeds and consume far less power than conventional ones.
The technology, Intel said, solves two of the more intractable problems facing the development and manufacture of microprocessors today as more and more transistors are packed onto each chip: power consumption and heat. In addition, as the geometries on chips become ever smaller, it becomes increasingly difficult to ensure that electrons go where they were engineered to go, a problem that can lead to current leakage within the device.
The advances, which Intel calls the TeraHertz transistor because it cycles on and off 1 trillion times per second, could ultimately lead to new applications, such as real-time voice and face recognition, computing without keyboards and ever-smaller electronic gizmos with higher performance and improved battery life. To compare, it would take a person more than 15,000 years to turn a light switch on and off a trillion times.
