BASF, IBM team up in chip venture
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BASF, the world&#39;s leading chemicals maker, said on Friday that it had agreed with US computer giant IBM jointly to develop electronic materials for use in the manufacturing of integrated circuits.
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IBM's new chip works in 64-processor servers and contains features to let users cap system power consumption.
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Semiconductor chips that can manage a good bit of their own upkeep are moving closer to reality.
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Flash memory and hard-disk drives could face a challenge from a new chip technology, dubbed phase-change memory, being developed by a group of companies led by IBM.
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A conglomerate of Japanese companies hopes to develop biochips.
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IBM used its Blue Gene supercomputer to model an improved transistor in its race with Intel to build faster chips.
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Toshiba Corp  said on Tuesday it  would join a group led by International Business Machines Corp   to develop system chips using 32-nanometre circuitry,  as chip makers increasingly team up to cut development costs.
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Foundry partner gears up for second-generation 90nm Efficeons
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IBM is producing a more advanced version of the Cell microprocessor, the chip it developed with Sony and Toshiba.
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IBM , Singapore's Chartered  Semiconductor  and Samsung Electronics   will join forces to develop and manufacture chips using an  advanced processing technology, the companies said on  Wednesday.
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(InfoWorld) - IBM will work with the German chemical company BASF Group to produce a new generation of chips with feature sizes of 32 nanometers, the companies said Friday. The partnership will produce chips scheduled to reach the market in 2010, IBM said. Chips with circuits and other features of 32nm use less electricity and have smaller dimensions than chips built with 45nm or 60nm, allowing vendors of smartphones, notebook PCs, and other electronics to pack more processing power in their products. The two companies hope to create an improved approach to using chemicals in lithography, a method of manufacturing chips by stacking layers of different materials like a cake, then etching away part of each layer to create the tiny components of a microprocessor. Work will begin immediately at IBM's facility in Yorktown Heights, New York, and at BASF's headquarters in Ludwigshafen, Germany, said Ronald Goldblatt, a distinguished engineer and senior manager at IBM Research. BASF already supplies chemicals to many chipmakers, but under the new partnership it will also share its employees and expertise with IBM. Each company will play to its strengths, with most of the synthesis and testing happening at BASF, while prototyping and application work at IBM, Goldblatt said. He declined to comment on whether the deal involved any exchange of money. IBM plans to use the new chemicals across its entire range of products, which include itsÂ Power6 high-end server chipÂ announced on May 21, a variety of ASICs for telephony backbone platforms, and itsÂ Cell Broadband Engine chipÂ used to process high-end graphics data in gaming consoles, including Sony Computer Entertainment's PlayStation 3, Microsoft's Xbox 360, and Nintendo's Wii. The BASF deal marks an expansion of IBM's strategy of collaborating with partners to design new chips instead of doing all the work itself. IBM used the same approach when it created the Cell chip by collaborating with Sony and Toshiba. And on May 23,Â IBM said it would collaborateÂ with a larger group of chipmakers on 32nm semiconductor production technologies. That group includes Chartered Semiconductor Manufacturing, Freescale Semiconductor, Infineon Technologies, and Samsung Electronics. IBM is also using the new deal to ratchet up competition with Intel, which plans to bring its own 32nm architecture chips to market by 2009. The two companies have been locked in an increasingly public race to design faster chips since they both picked the same day in January to issue news releases about advances in "high-k metal gate" technology. That approach employs rare materials to construct smaller, more efficient transistors than the silicon dioxide used in modern chips. Intel insists it leads the industry in that race, with plans to use the new technique to launch its 45nm "Penryn" chip in the fourth quarter of 2007, while IBM and its partner Advanced Micro Devices don't plan to sell 45nm chips until the middle of 2008. Texas Instruments entered the contest as well on June 13, announcing a plan to use high-k materials in 45nm chips, also beginning production in the middle of 2008.
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(InfoWorld) - IBM Corp. has taken a large stride in its race with Intel Corp. to make faster, smaller chips by building silicon transistors from a rare combination of metals. Both companies announced in January that they had discovered theÂ special materials needed to build "high-k metal gate" transistors. The special materials are much better insulators than standard silicon dioxide, a crucial trait as chip designers struggle to fit more and more transistors on each microprocessor, since electricity tends to leak from the closely-packed wires, making them hot and inefficient. Until now, neither company had announced the ingredients of this new mix of materials. But IBM researchers said on Monday they had used their Blue Gene supercomputer to model 50 combinations of hafnium dioxide and basic silicon. The company plans to build chips based on the new mixture in 2008. The new material looked good in theory, but IBM engineers had to create simulations of different mixtures to avoid any surprises when they added it to semiconductor production lines, said Alessandro Curioni, a supercomputing expert at IBM's Zurich Research Laboratory. Curioni was one of three authors who published this research in a paper published in the January edition of the scientific journal Physical Review Letters. The team used new algorithms and a Blue Gene/L supercomputer with 4,096 processors to crunch the numbers. The program took about five days to run a simulation for each combination of ingredients, modeling the interaction between individual particles for the 600 atoms in every model. If the researchers had used a typical notebook PC, the 250-day job would have taken them 700 years, he said. Despite IBM's advance, Intel insists it is on track to reach markets first with chips using its own type of "high-k metal gate" transistors. Intel plans to use the technology in a family of 45-nanometer architecture chips scheduled for launch later in 2007, the company said. Â
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InfoWorld - IBM Corp. has taken a large stride in its race with Intel Corp. to make faster, smaller chips by building silicon transistors from a rare combination of metals.
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Airespace, a Silicon Valley telecom services start-up, won a partnership with International Business Machines Corp. (IBM.N: Quote, Profile, Research) that will help Airespace
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This morning, IBM confirmed to BetaNews that later this afternoon, its engineers are scheduled to demonstrate their own concept chip, which will utilize an embedded memory architecture for caching.  The company is saying it could double the performance of existing 65 nm processors and future generations by tripling its cache memory capacity and perhaps increase the throughput of that memory tenfold.
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A new semiconductor alloy jointly developed by IBM and its partners will spur the development of faster and smaller memory chips. The companies say the advancements would lead to smaller chips than currently possible with flash memory.
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IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM) and Advanced Micro Devices (NYSE: AMD) said Monday that they have developed a strained silicon transistor technology aimed at