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Story URL: http://management.silicon.com/itpro/0,39024675,39116760,00.htm

Intel to replace silicon
You'll never replace silicon! Oh... you mean in chips...

By Michael Kanellos

Published: Wednesday 05 November 2003

Moore's Law is alive and well, but Intel is changing its basic semiconductor recipes to make sure it stays that way.

The chip giant is looking at revamping two fundamental elements of its transistors - the transistor gate and the gate dielectric - so its chips will continue to increase in speed and performance.

Currently, the gate, which controls whether a transistor is on or off, is made of silicon atoms while the gate dielectric, an insulating layer below the gate, is made of silicon dioxide. By making both out of metal, Intel will be able to clamp down on electricity leakage and other looming problems that could put a lid on improvement. In experiments, the new transistors are setting records on certain parameters, according to the company.

Ken David, director of components research in Intel's Technology and Manufacturing Group, said: "We'd love to continue with silicon dioxide, but we can't do it because of leakage. People keep running into these fundamental roadblocks."

Chips with metallic gates and metallic gate dielectrics (also called high-k dielectrics) may appear in 2007 with the 45-nanometer manufacturing process.

Semiconductor design is currently undergoing a major overhaul and prompting engineers and designers to incorporate new structures or materials into chips at a more rapid rate than ever before. "The way the industry has approached it is change one material at a time," David said. Now, semiconductor designers are being asked to incorporate two or more novel concepts every two years.

Some of these technologies are already coming to the fore. Intel has just started to make processors with strained silicon, a design convention that lets electrons move more rapidly, while IBM has already released a dual-core processor.

Other ideas on the drawing board include multiple gate transistors, controlling transistor voltage, replacing wires inside chips with optical fiber and carbon nanotubes.

The changes are largely necessary because of the consequences of Moore’s Law, the famous dictum that states that the number of transistors on a chip double every two years.

Transistor count can be doubled because engineers can shrink the size of their transistors. Shrinkage, though, has made heat a major problem because millions of circuits are now crammed into small spaces where only a few hundred thousand transistors may have existed years before.

With the gate dielectric, thinness is an issue. The gate dielectric on chips coming out of Intel’s fabs next year will only be four to five atoms thick, David said. Thinning it further will cause additional leakage, or unintentional energy dissipation. Leakage can drain batteries and increase internal computer heat because more energy than should be necessary is required to animate these chips.

By switching to metal, leakage goes down because the chemical and physical properties of metal prevent electricity from escaping. With less leakage, chips can provide comparable performance on far less electricity, or it can run at a higher speed at the same energy levels.

As an added bonus, the gate dielectric layer can actually be thicker, which makes it easier to manufacture, but it will perform like a very thin traditional gate dielectric.

AMD has reported similar results in its published experiments.

Michael Kanellos writes for News.com