IBM pushes 32-nanometer chips with BASF deal
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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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IBM says that it has developed a technique of using &#39;strained germanium&#39; which, it claims, will triple the performance of commercial chips.
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Samsung Electronics has developed a chip-manufacturing technique able to significantly increase the amount of music, pictures, videos, and other data people can store in future iPods, iPhones, and other devices.The world&#39;s largest memory chip maker showed off a 64Gb multilevel cell (MLC) NAND flash memory chip made with an entirely new 30-nanometer production technology. A nanometer is a billionth of a meter, and the measure refers to the average size of the smallest features on the chip. The manufacturing breakthrough, which Samsung calls self-aligned double patterning technology (SaDPT), will enable the company to greatly increase the storage capacity of new NAND flash memory chips once the technology is in commercial production.For example, 16 of the 64Gb chips can be combined in a memory card for 128GB of storage space, enough for 80 DVD movies or 32,000 MP3 music files, the company said in a statement.Even more important for users, Samsung was able to make the technology leap without requiring certain expensive new chip making equipment. While moves to smaller production technologies often require investment in expensive new photolithography equipment, the company was able to use current photolithography gear to etch circuits on the silicon wafers. That should ensure low production costs and reasonable prices for end-users.SaDPT technology uses two pattern transfers to create the circuit design of each chip. The first transfer spaces the circuits widely apart, then the second transfer uses that space between the circuits to add another circuit, with the result that the circuitry is more densely packed together.Samsung has applied for 30 patents related to the new 64Gb flash chip, and said it also created a 32Gb chip with the same production technology. The company expects to begin mass production of 64Gb flash chips with its 30nm manufacturing technology in 2009.
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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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(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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New nanotech breakthroughs have enabled IBM to measure magnetic fields at an atomic level and to build transistor-like switches from a single molecule.
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(InfoWorld) - IBMÂ is pulling out the heavy artillery in its quest to build custom chips for both telephony backbone and handheld wireless devices, announcing a processor family built with silicon-on-insulator (SOI) technology that is usually reserved for server processors. By borrowing SOI technology from its line of Power server chips -- includingÂ the top-shelf Power6Â -- IBM will achieve a 30 percent performance gain compared to chips using standard CMOS (complementary metal oxide semiconductor) technology, the company said Tuesday. And by building it on a scale of 45-nanometer feature sizes, IBM will achieve higher performance than comparable 65nm chips. IBM will launch this Cu-45HP (high performance) custom chip in early 2008, intended for manufacturers of switches and routers as well as cellphones and portable gaming systems. IBM will design a customized version of the ASIC (application specific integrated circuit) for each new client platform, said Bernard Meyerson, an IBM fellow and chief technology officer for IBM's Systems and Technology Group. The company already builds ASICs for the telephony market, but the new design will allow it to create more powerful designs in less time and at lower cost, he said. To boost power-efficiency, IBM is using 45-nm architecture embedded DRAM (dynamic RAM) instead of SRAM (static RAM) in the chip. Although DRAM has three to four times more memory density than SRAM, the company has never before used it for on-chip data storage because it is "pathetically slow," Meyerson said. IBM solved that problem with a recent advance that improves DRAM read/write data access speeds. Chips run faster and use less electricity when they use data stored on the processor itself instead of fetching that data from another location on the circuit board, he said. Once it launches the new chip, IBM expects to quickly reach full manufacturing capacity. Although the chip uses a new combination of technologies, IBM already builds processors with each of the components, such as the SOI-based processors it makes for gaming consoles including Sony Computer Entertainment's PlayStation 3, Microsoft's Xbox 360, and Nintendo's Wii. Despite the new features, IBM is announcing the Cu-45HP at a challenging time in the global chip market. Worldwide sales of semiconductors reached $19.9 billion in April, showing a decline from March as average selling prices continued to drop, according to a report released Monday by the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA). From January through April, sales were down by nearly 2 percent from the same period of 2006, the report said. The revenue slump occurred because prices have sunk faster than a modest rise in demand for consumer electronics. That consumer demand has bolstered the number of unit shipments in the market, but chip makers are collecting less money because of tumbling prices for many types of chips, including microprocessors, DRAMs and NAND flash, according to the SIA. Also on Tuesday, IBM announced new digital and analog semiconductors for mobile handsets and other wireless products. They include the SiGe BiCMOS 5PAe, a silicon-germanium-based analog product for making efficient power amplifiers in cell phones and WiMAX applications, the SiGe BiCMOS 6WL, an entry-level version of the company's existing technology for high-volume consumer electronics including cell phones and GPS (global positioning system) devices, and the CMOS 11LP, a product design to improve power efficiency in handset design. IBM is selling the 6WL design kits now, and plans to launch the other two products later in 2007. Â
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Advanced Micro Devices and IBM have collaborated on new strained silicon technology, which stands to boost transistor speed. In a statement ahead of the IEEE International Electron Devices Meeting in San Francisco
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In the increasingly competitive RFID arena, IBM on Thursday will release the first three products from its recently formed $250 million S&amp;A (Sensor &amp; Actuator) arm.
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Foundry partner gears up for second-generation 90nm Efficeons
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Intel Corp , the world's  largest chipmaker, will be able to make microprocessors with  features as small as 32 nanometers within two years, its chief  executive said on Tuesday.
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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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SAN JOSE, CALIFORNIA - The days of relying on shrinking transistors to achieve performance gains are over, and the chip industry needs to enter a new era of innovation where system-level features are just as important as thinner transistor gates, said IBM Corp.'s Bernie Meyerson in a keynote address at the Fall Processor Forum Tuesday.
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Implemented using Texas Instruments&#39; 90 nanometer process technology, UltraSPARC IV+ will double the application throughput of the existing UltraSPARC IV through expanded caches and buffers, a better branch prediction mechanism, augmented prefetching
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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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Toshiba has joined with an IBM-led research group to extend its work on 32 nanometer chip technology.
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IBM says it is developing new  circuitry that could triple the data stored on a typical  microprocessor, and thereby double the performance of  computers, the Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday.