Intel Corp (INTC)

[Maui]

Biggest advances in chips in 40 years
INTEL, IBM UNVEIL BREAKTHROUGH
By Therese Poletti
Mercury News
Intel and IBM each separately announced competing developments Friday described as the biggest advances in semiconductor chip making in over 40 years.

Using new materials and a new manufacturing process, the two companies announced advances that would increase the speed and power of chips for another decade.

But Intel of Santa Clara is apparently much farther along, saying it will launch new chips for computers, laptops and servers before the end of the year based on the advances.

One of the most important features is that the faster chips will also consumer much less power, an epidemic problem for some companies in the industry.
``It's a real breakthrough ... for both of them,'' said Rick Doherty, research director of The Envisioneering Group in Seaford, N.Y. ``I wouldn't be surprised if members of these teams were up for the Nobel prize.''

The news from both tech giants is a proof point that after almost seven years of industry research, transistors can be built using so-called high-k metal gates. Transistors are the simple on-off switches that process the ones and zeroes of electrical data on a chip.

Intel said that the development will ensure that Moore's Law will thrive well into the next decade. Moore's Law is the name given to a prediction by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore, who said in the 1960s that the number of transistors on a chip would double every two years. That prediction has proved to be an industry benchmark that has paved the way for faster, cheaper and more reliable computers, cell phones and other consumer electronics.

Moore, 78, came out of retirement, where he spends some of his time in Hawaii, to issue a statement Friday about the Intel team's innovation. He said Intel's use of high-k and metal materials ``marks the biggest change in transistor technology'' since Intel's pioneering use of polysilicon in 1969.

Polysilicon, a mixture of small silicon crystals, acts as the gate of the transistor, which determines whether the transistor is on or off. Intel and IBM are both heralding a new gate made from a combination of metal and a higher insulating material called high-k, an engineering term for the ability of a material to hold a charge. By replacing one element with metal, efficiency goes up, because metal can hold an electrical charge better than the less efficient silicon.

Yoshio Nishi, a professor of electrical engineering at Stanford University, said that many companies, research labs and universities, including Stanford, have been conducting research on using high-k metal gates in the transistor, with some difficulties.

``Despite many serious efforts worldwide, there are a lot of challenging and difficult problems to be solved before commercialization,'' Nishi said. He said that Intel's news that it has working chips using these technologies proves to the industry that this is a possible path to continue the march to doubling transistors on a chip.

Even if Intel does not make public yet all the details of how it achieved its advances, Nishi said, this will inspire others in the industry. If someone can run 100 meters and breaks a record, ``No one knows how he or she did it,'' Nishi said. ``But the fact that they did it, then everyone will try to break that record. In this technical world, a similar mechanism also works.''

Intel said its new family of chips, code-named Penryn, will have 410 million transistors, using the new materials combined with the 45-nanometer technology manufacturing process. This compares with about 280 million in current chips. Intel also said electrical leakage will be reduced by a factor of about 30 percent.

Nishi described IBM's advance as still in the research phase. IBM made its announcement as part of its research partnership with Intel's rival, Advanced Micro Devices of Sunnyvale, along with Sony and Toshiba.

The two companies have different approaches to their use of high-k metal gates.

Doherty, the Envisioneering analyst, said IBM integrates their high-k metal inside the silicon, where Intel's development is on top of the silicon.

``Imagine a farm where the irrigation is on the surface, moving across the land,'' Doherty said. ``The Intel technique is making sure there is good metal irrigation on the surface and IBM has gone straight into the ground with sprinklers.'' He said IBM's approach could enable it to stack more layers together in the silicon, and thus enable even more transistors.

The two companies were clearly angling to be first with the news. Intel had previously planned to announce its development last week, but its new partnership with Sun Microsystems took precedence. But the Armonk, N.Y. computer giant is believed to be presenting a technical paper on its advances with high-k metal gates at a technical conference in about six months and word of its paper has leaked through the semiconductor industry, analysts said.

``We will put it out the door in a product in roughly in the '08 time frame,'' said Bernie Meyerson, chief technologist for IBM Systems and Technology Group and an IBM Fellow. ``It's almost meaningless to say I'm going to ship a chip first. Yes, you can do that. It doesn't mean that you are actually going to put it into a server, there is a ton of work to get to that.''

Intel said that the team of engineers at its research center in Hillsborough, Oregon, took new chips out of their research factory, using a new 45-nanometer process, and put them in a system and booted up several operating systems on the chips, including Microsoft's new Vista. They toasted the moment with sparkling apple cider instead of champagne.

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