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Stretching the chip: the pace gets hot Thin Is In -- A CPU Update. Recently, I've been making homemade pizza. A heavy pizza stone, a 500-degree oven, and a continuing battle to stretch the dough very thin without tearing it (dough has a mind of its own!) are helping me to approximate the crisp, very thin crust that I really enjoy. I guess the folks at IBM's semiconductor research labs must have similar tastes, because at work, they've now begun stretching silicon! Brought to our attention by RCFoC reader Don McArthur, the scientists have demonstrated that by stretching, or "straining" silicon's atomic lattice by one percent (while being careful not to break the atomic bonds), they can reduce the resistance that electrons encounter. And that allows these chips to run up to thirty-five percent faster, while consuming less power! The icing on this silicon cake is that they're producing these strained silicon chips using conventional semiconductor manufacturing technology, rather than esoteric lab processes. The yield for strained silicon devices does have to improve before they're ready for the commercial market, but this is expected to occur by 2003. Additional details are at http://www.ibm.com/news/2001/06/08.phtml http://www.nytimes.com/2001/06/08/technology/08BLUE.html , and http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1003-200-6221222.html?tag=mn_hd. The intriguing thing about this semiconductor advance is that it demonstrates that there are ways to increase semiconductor performance at a given level of miniaturization -- this technique yields a 35% speed improvement without shrinking the transistors at all (the "traditional" way of speeding things up)! Which implies that as Moore's Law continues to shrink the transistors as well, we'll get compounded improved performance. Not bad. Of course there may be a small fly in IBM's ointment -- RCFoC reader Harry Hardman points out that another company, AmberWave Systems (http://www.amberwave.com/), is claiming that THEY invented "strained silicon," and will happily license their intellectual property to one and all (http://maccentral.macworld.com/news/0106/14.silicon.shtml) Who owns which, and owes what to whom, can get very complex in the world of high tech patents... But regardless of how that plays out, IBM has some other irons in their silicon foundry fires. According to a June 25 announcement (http://www.ibm.com/Press/prnews.nsf/jan/BEBB30C4F4637CCC85256A7600498511), they've developed a new silicon-germanium transistor that has reached speeds of 210 Gigahertz(!), while sipping a mere milliamp of current. This transistor is expected to yield specialized communications chips that will run at, "...
100GHz within two years -- five times faster and four years The silicon-germanium combination can reach such speeds, in part, because electrons can move more quickly through this material than through silicon itself. But what intrigues me the most about this announcement are comments made by IBM Fellow and VP Bernard Meyerson in the June 25 New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2001/06/25/technology/25CHIP.html?todaysheadlines), where he says that this development is, "...nowhere
near the physical limits of the technology... The Especially on the heels of Intel's recent reflection that "the pace of silicon development is accelerating" (http://www.compaq.com/rcfoc/20010625.html#_Toc517429545), these latest developments represent another reminder, and just the tip of the iceberg, that as we get better at tinkering with things at the molecular and at the atomic levels, the results will have an enormous impact on the things around us. Today... Oh, and on the more pedestrian "today" front, Intel is about to launch the next increment in Pentium 4 speed -- 1.8 gigahertz chips should be available next week (http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1003-200-6394431.html?tag=dd.ne.dht.nl-hed.0). Amazing as it might have seemed just one year ago, the day of the 2 gigahertz commodity CPU is fast approaching... ...And Tomorrow. I can easily imagine a day, when looking back at today's chips will seem like looking back at a vacuum tube radio -- we won't be able to imagine how we could have survived with such crude, huge, and power-hungry devices. Just the tip of the iceberg... Don't Blink! Jeffery R Harrow This is exclusive to it@tt. Excerpted from the "Rapidly Changing Face of Computing", a free weekly multimedia technology journal written by Jeffrey R. Harrow, Principal Member of Technical Staff for the Corporate Strategy Group at Compaq Computer Inc. A more extensive version of this discussion, as well as others around the innovations and trends of contemporary computing and the technologies that drive them, are available at http://www.compaq.com/rcfoc. Jeff's opinions do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Compaq. The RCFoC is a service of, and Copyright 2001, Compaq Computer Corp. All Rights Reserved. |
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