Intel researchers have discovered a new material that they believe will permit them to overcome one of the most serious obstacles facing chip makers as they struggle to shrink computer chips to ever-smaller dimensions.
The announcement, scheduled at a technical conference in Japan yesterday, could be a crucial step forward because the industry has been increasingly plagued by the problem of preventing electrical current from leaking outside its proper path as each generation of chips has moved closer to fundamental physical limits.
With today's transistor gates -- which consist of a piece of material that functions like a water faucet for electrical current -- approaching thicknesses of just five atomic layers, computer chips have come to require more power, which causes them to run much hotter.
Intel, the world's largest chip maker, has been struggling with the problem of excess heat as it has moved its manufacturing technology from etchings as small as 130 nanometers to the even narrower 90-nanometer limit. The measure refers to the length of a crucial component in the transistors that are the basic element of each generation.
Intel's chips have been running significantly hotter with each generation and there have been recent reports that its most advanced version of the Pentium, dubbed Prescott, has been delayed because of leakage woes.
The new Intel technology would not come into effect until about 2007, still perhaps three generations of chip advances into the future. The industry is just now making the transition to 90 nanometers. After that it hopes to scale down to 65 nanometers first, followed by a leap to just 45 nanometers, where the new material, which Intel refuses to identify, would come into play.
The semiconductor industry has been searching intensely for a new material to replace silicon dioxide, which is used as an insulator between the gate and the channel through which current flows when a transistor is switched on.
Intel has had a small team working on the problem of a replacement for silicon in its Hillsborough, Oregon, research laboratories for five years in an effort to continue to advance chip making technology at the relentless pace of Moore's law, which predicts that the number of transistors that can packed into the same space should double every 18 months.
"We want to continue on these short cycles," said Sunlin Chou, senior vice president and GM of Intel's Technology and Manufacturing Group, "even though there are those in the industry who are implying that we can't keep this pace."
A number of independent researchers and competitors said that the Intel announcement came in the most important research area in the chip industry. But several noted that the company's research paper was highly unusual in that it lacked technical details necessary for scientists to assess the impact of the announcement.
"This is going in the direction the whole industry is moving," said Bernard Meyerson, an IBM vice president who is in charge of the company's semiconductor research. But he warned that it was difficult to judge Intel's achievement because the company had chosen not to name the materials it is planning to use.
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