Posted by : meshy on Nov 05, 2003 - 05:10 PM Hardware

Intel has discovered two new materials for manufacturing computer chips to replace those that have served as the foundation of chip-making for more than 30 years. It says the materials will solve one of the industry's biggest problems.
Intel plans to present a paper on its findings today at a conference in Japan. But it won't be giving out many details on the new materials, which the company refused to identify for what it says are competitive reasons.

The Santa Clara chip giant said it believes the two breakthroughs will help crack the conundrum of electrical current leakage -- a huge issue plaguing the industry as millions and millions of transistors are now added to each new generation of computer chip.

"If we can't solve this heat problem, then the semiconductor industry won't be able to continue as it has in the past," said Ron Willoner, a technology analyst at Intel's technology and manufacturing group. "We can't continue Moore's Law," he said, referring to Intel co-founder Gordon Moore's theory that the number of transistors on a chip should double about every two years.

Transistors are the on-off switches for the electrical current in a silicon chip. But with so many electrons passing through transistors, they act more like dimmer switches than like light switches, said Steve Kleynhans, a Meta Group analyst.

"It's never on all the way, and it's never off all the way," he said. "If you are leaking too many electrons, your transistor isn't working very well." As chips from Intel approach one billion transistors on a single chip, that heat dissipation could be enormous.

"It goes from a hot plate today and is approaching the heat and density of a nuclear reactor," said Bill Calder, an Intel spokesman.

Electrical current leakage can be felt when a computer starts to over heat. If the leakage problem is not resolved, it could stymie future advances as chips could become too hot to operate computers and other devices.

Many companies in the industry are working on the issue, and Intel in particular has much at stake. Volume production of the company's new Pentium chip, code-named Prescott, has been delayed because of a rumored power leakage issue.

Intel said it has been able to develop high performing transistors by replacing silicon dioxide, the insulating material that sits under the transistors, with a material that engineers refer to as a high k because it can hold a great deal of electric charge.

But that exact nature of the material remains a mystery. Intel said that its high-k material reduces electrical current leakage by more than 100 times compared with silicon dioxide.

In conjunction with this secret material, Intel also said it is using new, unidentified metal materials for the gate of the transistor. The gates of a transistor sit at the top of the transistor and turn the transistor on or off. Gates are now made of polycrystalline silicon, also called polysilicon.




At least one of Intel's competitors was nonplussed with its announcement.

"I think that there is nothing really Earth-shaking in here," said Tim Rost, a researcher in silicon technology at Texas Instruments. "I read a copy of the paper. I was disappointed that they didn't specify what high-k dieletric they are looking at. TI has been pretty straightforward in saying here is what we are looking at."

Dallas-based TI has been working with a material called hafnium silicon oxynitride together with a metal gate. He said that there are some reliability issues associated with high-k materials and metals.

But Intel's research is a "very big deal," said Dan Hutcheson, president of VLSI Research in Santa Clara, a market researcher and consultant to the semiconductor equipment industry.

Intel said it hopes to begin using the new materials in chips that it will begin to manufacture in 2007, but it probably won't know until 2006 if they will work in production.

"We are already producing excellent results in the lab," said Intel's Willoner.

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