WSJ(12/11) Intel Wrestles With Challenge Of Chip Leakage
By Don Clark
SAN FRANCISCO -- Andrew Grove has seen the semiconductor industry overcome many hurdles since the 1960s. But there is a big one ahead that has the chairman of Intel Corp., and its top scientists, scratching their heads.
The issue is leakage, the electrical current that tends to escape from chip circuitry when it isn't being used. As Intel and other companies have gone from squeezing hundreds of thousands of transistors on each chip to hundreds of millions, the current lost by each tiny circuit sharply increases the total power a chip consumes.
More electrical current costs computer users money and increases the heat generated by chips, making it hard to package them into personal computers and other systems. Mr. Grove, in a speech to chip engineers here, showed an unusual frankness in disclosing just how stumped his scientists are.
"What we can't get rid of is power leakage," Mr. Grove said. "Current is becoming a major factor and a limiter on how complex we can build chips."
That is a big concern, because many companies have built businesses around the ever-increasing performance of chips, driven mainly by the shrinkage of transistors. If anything disrupted that pattern of progress -- known as Moore's Law, after Intel co-founder Gordon Moore -- the future of Silicon Valley could change radically.
An ordinary chip might draw 12 watts of power and leak 12% to 15% of it. But leakage accounts for 40% or so of the power consumed by Intel's most advanced chips, Mr. Grove said during his keynote address at the International Electron Devices Meeting. In a few years, when chips have as many as one billion transistors, they may leak 60 to 70 watts of power, he predicted.
Speaking metaphorically, Mr. Grove said that "in our headlong pursuit of performance . . . we are heading toward a nuclear reactor" in terms of electrical current consumed by chips.
Engineers have some time to work on the problem. Mark Bohr, an Intel chip scientist who holds the title of senior fellow, said the company is working on new insulating materials and other techniques to fight leakage.
"We have things in the pipeline that can get us through the decade," Mr. Bohr said following Mr. Grove's talk. "Then it gets really questionable."
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
12-10-02 2156ET
