Advertisment

IBM develops ICs to enhance computing power

author-image
CIOL Bureau
New Update

YORKTOWN HEIGHTS, N.Y: IBM Corp. has said it has developed a way to build three-dimensional integrated circuits that can increase the amount of computing power on a microchip. IBM said that in its 3D circuit, it builds separate layers of transistors at the same time and then connects them together electrically. It also decreases the length of the wires that connect different parts of the chip, which adds performance.



Transistors are tiny switches, millions of which make up an integrated circuit, or microchip. Putting transistors on top of one another instead of simply side-by-side as in current chips increases the amount of computing power by increasing the density of transistors.



Researchers have been working on ways to build increasingly powerful chips as they follow the tenet set out by Gordon Moore, the founder of Intel, which says that the number of transistors on a chip doubles every 18 months. Intel Corp. is also working on 3D circuits and in September said that it had developed a tri-gate transistor, which has three gates compared to the one gate per transistor that is the current industry standard.



Chips are the brains behind everything from large corporate computers to personal computers to toasters. IBM will present details of the technique in a paper at the International Electron Devices Meeting in San Francisco from Dec. 9-11.



© Reuters

tech-news