IBM, AMD Work to Shrink Chips
339611
IBM and Advanced Micro Devices have tacked a three-year extension onto their December 2002 collaboration agreement that could see the two companies work on chip-making technologies based on a 32-nanometer process.
526997
IBM says it has found the answer: New technology that squeezes more memory onto a slice of silicon. By the Associated Press.
510564
(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
648997
Researchers at IBM  and Advanced Micro Devices Inc.  have improved a chip-making technology called strained silicon, boosting  semiconductor performance at a time when such gains are increasingly hard to come by, the companies said on Sunday.
381367
Advanced Micro Devices has been facing profit pressure--but new chipmaking techniques are giving it more room to lower prices.
646612
AMD and IBM have extended their chip-manufacturing technology agreement for another three years according to investors.com. The previous deal, signed in 2002, was due to run out next year.
634975
Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) will implement the strained silicon manufacturing technique on its upcoming 90-nanometer processors as well as 130-nanometer processors released this quarter, an AMD spokesman said Friday.
119775
A smaller and more efficient design could help the chipmaker better compete.
66929
IBM and Advanced Micro DevicesÂ (AMD) have jointly developed a new method for implementing strained silicon technology on both positive and negative transistors, the companies are expected to announce Monday.
726353
By JORDAN ROBERTSON  SAN JOSE, Calif. - IBM has devised a way to triple the amount of memory stored on computer chips and double the performance of data-hungry processors by replacing a problematic type of memory with a variety that uses much less space on the slice of silicon.
750766
Advanced Micro Devices and IBM will work together to devise chip-manufacturing technology for three additional years, a deal that will bring about a quarter of a billion to IBM over four years and give AMD access to cutting-edge chip inventions.
540195
The issue: 65-nm and 45-nm chip components have shrunk so far that they are now smaller than the wavelength of the light used to carve those features onto silicon chips. To fight that trend, AMD and IBM said they will use three new technologies to boost manufacturing efficiency.
762940
(InfoWorld) - As Intel Corp. and Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD) race toward smaller, faster chips, the fierce competition is taking its toll as both companies struggle to maintain profit margins by using more efficient manufacturing. At the tiny scale of 45-nanometer transistors and wires, a single speck of dust on a 300-millimeter silicon wafer can destroy an entire processor. Lower manufacturing yields cut into a company's profit margin, reducing the number of functional chips they can sell from each wafer. "As an industry, we're running out of gas at 45-nanometer geometry," said Nick Kepler, vice president of logic technology development for AMD. "We've been unable to scale the size as much as we used to because of leakage. We're still putting transistors closer together, but not shrinking the gates. So geometry shrinks can hurt you now, which they haven't in the past." One problem is that 65-nm and 45-nm chip components have shrunk so far that they are now smaller than the wavelength of the light used to carve those features onto silicon chips. To fight that trend,Â AMD and IBM Corp. said they will use three new technologies to boost manufacturing efficiency. By the second half of 2008, AMD expects to be producing 45-nm chips using immersion lithography, ultra-low-k interconnect dielectrics, and enhanced transistor strain. The companies made the announcement at the International Electron Device Meeting in San Francisco. By inserting liquid instead of air between the projection lens and the wafer, AMD and IBM can reduce the wavelength of the light, giving them a 40 percent gain in resolution compared to dry lithography and allowing them to sell a higher percentage of the hundreds of chips on every wafer, Kepler said. Likewise, IBM plans to produce 65-nm server chips by the second half of 2007, then shrink both server and gaming chips to 45-nm at some point in the future, said Gary Patton, vice president of technology development for IBM's semiconductor research and development center. AMD and IBM have cooperated on chip development since 2003, and last year extended their contract through 2011 to reach the 32-nm and 22-nm chip generations. In response, Intel says that it beat AMD to the market with 65-nm chip sales by more than a year, andÂ has already begun producing samples of its 45-nm "Penryn" quad-core chipÂ for notebooks, desktops and servers. Intel plans to ship those chips in the second half of 2007. Even if AMD improves its manufacturing, Intel is poised to continue its lead in shrinking chip geometries because it has shorter gate lengths and SRAM (static RAM) cell sizes, said Rob Willoner, a technology analyst with Intel's technology and manufacturing group. "People have different meanings when they talk about the 65-nm process. There's not an industry standard," he said. AMD's Opteron chip was a commercial success because its excellent design compensated for poor dimensions at the 90-nm scale, he said. Chips with a greater cache of local memory stored in SRAM cells can avoid the time-intensive process of retrieving data from external sources. At the same conference in San Francisco this week, Intel announced plans to use "floating-body cells" to further increase the amount of on-chip memory, according to published reports. Despite the manufacturing challenges, chip companies continue to build smaller features because of the tremendous performance benefits. By shrinking from 90 nm to 65 nm, Intel chips have double the transistor density while reducing leakage five-fold (at constant performance) and requiring 30 percent less switching power. Â
294687
Chips have become so tiny that atomic-level defects cause serious problems.
557456
Ziff Davis - Designed to let processors adjust themselves dynamically in response to problems or systems demands without human intervention, the chip-morphing technology could help IBM  keep up with demand for good chips.
222319
Researchers at IBM IBM.N and  Advanced Micro Devices Inc. AMD.N have improved a chip-making  technology called strained silicon, boosting  semiconductor  performance at a time when such gains are increasingly hard to  come by, the companies said on Sunday.
758159
Advanced Micro Devices has begun to incorporate a form of strained silicon into its chips, a design twist that will let the company increase the performance of its processors.