Intel transistor paves way to 20GHz chips
Intel, the world's largest semiconductor maker, has developed what it says is the fastest and smallest transistor ever.
The breakthrough means that Moore's Law, which stipulates that the number of transistors on a chip doubles every two years, will remain on the books until at least 2007.
Intel was scheduled to announce the development on Sunday at the Silicon Nanoelectronics Workshop in Kyoto, Japan.
In its research labs in Hillsboro, Oregon, Intel engineers have designed and manufactured a handful of transistors that are only 20 nanometers, or 0.02 microns, in size. By comparison, the transistors found in the latest chips in use today measure 0.18 microns from one side of the transistor gate to the other.
The implications of developing such small and fast transistors are significant: Silicon will be able to be used to make chips until 2007, and it will make possible microprocessors containing close to 1 billion transistors running at 20 gigahertz by that year. Today's Pentium 4 processors have about 42 million transistors and run at 1.7 gigahertz.
"There's been a lot of talk and concern about the end of Moore's Law," Gerald Marcyk, the director of components research for Intel's technology and manufacturing group, told Reuters this week. "So far, we haven't hit any fundamental limits with respect to our transistor technology."
Approaching the speed limit
Even so, it appears that Moore's Law is close to running out of steam. Some of the components in the transistors Intel announced--such as the silicon dioxide gate, a layer that prevents the metal on top from short-circuiting out the silicon underneath when current is passed through it to make the transistors function--are only three atoms thick.
"You can't really scale much lower than three atoms thick," Marcyk said, referring to the two oxygen atoms and one silicon atom bound together that constitute the gate.
By the time Intel--and others--roll out semiconductors with transistor gates 0.02 microns wide, those chips will last for one more processor generation. Such a generation, in Intel's case, typically lasts about three years. This means that Moore's Law--formulated by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore decades ago--will last into the next decade.
After that, the dimensions get so small that a new material will be required, and researchers across the globe are trying to figure out what it will be.
That is where something called high-k gate dialectrics comes into play.
"We're going to have to invent a new kind of material to replace the silicon dioxide," Marcyk said. "And right now, that process is what I like to call the random walk through the periodic table (of the elements)."
Software possiblities
Of course, a microprocessor is ultimately only as powerful and useful as the software programs that are written to run on them. But processors with 1 billion transistors, Marcyk said, leave the field wide open.
For example, computers and hand-held devices will be able to understand commands in natural language, as well as handwriting. An investor could check his stock portfolio in the morning and find that the computer has analyzed the portfolio, market trends, economic data and such to present a number of options.
"You log on in the morning and (the computer) gives you two or three options: 'Have you thought about doing one of these things? I've done the calculations for you,'" Marcyk said.
Transistors, as they get smaller, require less power, so microprocessors in 2007 will consume less power in all than those on the market today, Marcyk said.
Not surprisingly, Andy Grove, Intel's hard-charging and hypercompetitive chairman, has taken an interest in the research on just how much longer transistors based on silicon can continue to work.
"One of the things Andy Grove keeps asking me is, when do they stop working?" Marcyk said. "And I say I don't know yet. I keep shrinking them, and they keep working."
