ARMONK, USA: IBM and its joint development partners -- AMD, Chartered Semiconductor Manufacturing Ltd, Freescale, Infineon and Samsung -- announced an innovative approach to speed the implementation of a breakthrough material known as "high-k/metal gate" in next generation 32nm computer chips.

This new approach, an industry first based on what engineers call a 'high-k gate-first', process, is designed to provide a simpler, less time consuming way for clients to migrate to high-k metal gate technology in order to secure benefits that include improved performance and reduced power consumption.

Chips using the new technique will support a range of applications -- from low-power computer microchips targeted at wireless and other consumer-oriented devices to high-performance microprocessors for games and enterprise computing. This new approach to implementing high-k/metal gate will be available to IBM alliance members and their clients in the second half of 2009.

On January 29, 2007, IBM and its research partners (including Sony and Toshiba) introduced the "high-k/metal gate” innovation as the basis for a long-sought improvement to the transistor -– the tiny on/off switch that serves as the basic building block of virtually all microchips made today. Using the high-k/metal gate material in a critical portion of the transistor that controls its primary on/off switching function enabled the development of 32nm chip circuitry that is designed to be smaller, faster, and more power-efficient than previously thought possible.

Using high-k/metal gate IBM and its Alliance Partners have been able to successfully shrink the size of a chip by up to 50 percent as compared to the previous technology generation while improving a number of other performance specifications. For example, high-k metal gate chips save about 45 percent total power, an increasingly critical metric in all electronics applications.

Together these improvements will help to increase functionality and performance with lower power consumption and improved battery life in mobile devices. For microprocessor applications, this innovation also enables up to 30 percent higher performance as documented in measurements performed by IBM and its Alliance Partners at IBM’s East Fishkill, NY semiconductor manufacturing facility.