Alpha and Omega Semiconductor Releases SRFET(TM) Series of MOSFETs With Monolithically Integrated Schottky Diode
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Alpha and Omega Semiconductor, Inc. (AOS), a leading developer of advanced power semiconductor solutions, announced today that it has released a brand new family of power MOSFETs that feature an integrated Schottky diode.
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A tiny, fully functional, 70-megabit static random access memory computer chip crammed with more than 500 million transistors has been developed by researchers at Intel Corp.
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Intel develops a new chip that roughly doubles the number of transistors on a chip.
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For decades, computer performance has been driven largely by the increasing numbers of ever-smaller transistors squeezed into the machines' silicon brains. With each generation, speeds jumped and prices dropped.
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Researchers at IBM and Advanced Micro Devices have improved a chip-making technology called strained silicon, boosting semiconductor performance at a time when such
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To: TECHNOLOGY EDITORS  Contact: Michael Markowitz of STMicroelectronics, +1-212-821- 8959, michael.markowitz@st.com   GENEVA, Feb.
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A half century after transistors were first integrated onto silicon chips, the technology for shrinking them appears to be reaching its limit. Without the regular, dramatic performance improvements we've come to expect, the computer industry may hit a wall.
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(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
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In dueling announcements, Intel Corp. and IBM separately say they have solved a puzzle perplexing the semiconductor industry about how to reduce energy loss in microchip transistors
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Chartered Semiconductor Manufacturing (Nasdaq:CHRT)(SGX-ST:Chartered),  one of the world's top dedicated foundries,  today announced the extension of its joint development efforts with IBM  to include 32-nanometer (nm) bulk complementary metal oxide  semiconductor (CMOS) technology.
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Intel has pledged to reduce drastically leakage effects in its 65nm process, having punched out its first device containing over 500m transistors using the technology.
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AMD and IBM have developed a strained silicon transistor technology which the firms believe will dramatically increase processor performance.
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CHIP GIANT INTEL is expected to announce today that it has succeeded in producing an SRAM using 65 nanometre technology. The chip circuit gates are also a third smaller than using the current 90 nanometre process technology, Intel will claim.
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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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On the very same day that Intel announced to the world it had developed the critical formula for the material that will replace silicon dioxide as the dielectric gate in transistors for metal oxide semiconductors, its biggest arch-rival in the research and development field, IBM, announced the very same thing.
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IBM and Advanced Micro Devices have come up with a new way of straining silicon in a move that will allow them to make chips with better performance.
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Semiconductor chips that can manage a good bit of their own upkeep are moving closer to reality.