Intel Announces Chip Shrinking Milestone
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Contradicting fears that the semiconductor industry's pace of development is slowing, Intel Corp. announced it has achieved a milestone in shrinking the size of transistors that will power its next-generation chips.
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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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Processor at 3.8GHz may mark the end of Intel's speed race.
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CONTRADICTING fears that the semiconductor industry&#39;s pace of development is slowing, Intel has achieved a milestone in shrinking the size of transistors that will power next-generation chips.
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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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As expected, Intel Corp. introduced a 3.8GHz Pentium 4 processor Monday in what could represent the end of an era for the chip maker.
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Intel Corp. INTC.O on Thursday  canceled plans to introduce its highest-speed desktop computer  chip, ending for now a 25-year run that has seen the speeds of  Intel's microprocessors increase by more than 750 times.
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By Review, Idaho Business  Intel announced September 5 that it plans to lay off approximately 10,500 employees by the middle of 2007, reducing its workforce to 92,000.  Local microchip manufacturer Micron has a joint operating venture with Intel to produce flash memory.
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Intel, the world&#39;s largest chip maker, scrapped a plan Thursday to enter the digital television chip business, marking a major retreat from its push into consumer electronics.
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SAN JOSE, Calif. Semiconductor company Intel says it has made a breakthrough development in shrinking the size of chips. The Santa Clara-based company announced today it has created a fully functional 70 megabit
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The world&#39;s largest chip maker will shift research spending to a 3.8 GHz Pentium chip that will have twice the memory of the current version.
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Intel has created a more powerful memory chip without increasing its size, wrong-footing warnings that the firm had hit its technical limits.
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Intel Corp. will shift to a second-generation strained-silicon technique within its forthcoming 65-nanometer process technology, the company will announce on Monday.
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Intel has confirmed it will not release a 4GHz version of its flagship Pentium 4 product. Instead it will transfer its engineers to the company&#39;s new design priorities.
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SAN FRANCISCO -- The number of companies building and designing microprocessors is likely to shrink by approximately 40 percent over the next 10 years, analysts from Gartner Inc. predicted at the research firm's Semiconductor Industry Summit conference here in San Francisco Tuesday.
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Analysts&#39; assessments came after Intel announced last week that it was scrapping plans to develop a 4-gigahertz version of its Pentium 4 chip.
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Intel fired a warning flare Thursday that the recovery of the high-tech economy might be fading. The Santa Clara, Calif.-based chip giant, which has its largest base of operations in Hillsboro, lowered its