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Intel embraces new communications chip

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CIOL Bureau
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By Duncan Martell



SAN FRANCISCO: Intel Corp. has announced its plans to put some functions of analog and digital chips onto the same piece of silicon, its latest push into the communications semiconductor industry. Intel, the largest chipmaker, also said that, as part of bringing communications capabilities to its next-generation manufacturing process, it would use silicon-geranium transistors and mixed-signal circuitry. Transistors are the tiny switches that compose a semiconductor.



Intel said the new chips, which will be available early in 2004, could lead to a single-chip hand-held device that offers cellular phone, wireless-data-network and other connection services.



The semiconductors Intel plans to make would take advantage of Intel's manufacturing prowess, with its dozen or so leading-edge chip-making plants around the world. Intel executives noted that because of the smaller size of communications chips relative to its Pentium 4 microprocessor, there would be ample space in its plants to make the devices.



In addition to microprocessors, the brains of a personal computer, Intel is also the largest maker of flash memory, which is widely used in cell phones, and has an emerging communications and networking chips business. "If it all goes as planned, this would give Intel a competitive advantage because they'll be able to create circuits that are potentially less expensive, that are small and that are high-performing," said Joseph Byrne, an analyst at Gartner Dataquest.



If Intel does get it right, it could pose a competitive threat to communications chipmakers such as Broadcom Corp., Intersil Inc., LSI Logic Inc., Altera Corp. and others, analysts said. "Intel has articulated some interesting visions and they've created a manufacturing technology here that will help implement those visions, but we still have a ways to go" toward chips that have all analog and digital functions required on one piece of silicon, Byrne said.



The new communications process combines Intel's 90-nanometer manufacturing process for microprocessors with what it said were advances in so-called mixed-signal technology. A nanometer is a billionth of a meter.



"They've created the ability to combine analog circuits with leading-edge digital circuits, but there's no implication that the analog circuits will shrink at the same rate" as digital circuits have done over the years in keeping with Moore's Law, Byrne said.



Moore's Law is the observation by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore in 1965 that the number of transistors in a chip doubles every couple of years, boosting performance, decreasing the size of the chip and lowering manufacturing costs.



Intel's addition of silicon germanium boosts the performance of the transistors in communications significantly, Intel said, and the material is used in what it calls the Silicon Germanium HBT transistor. Intel said that its 90-nanometer communications chips will be made from silicon wafers that are 300 millimeters in diameter. Most other chip companies' plants are still using equipment designed for 200-millimeter-diameter wafers.



The move to larger wafers means chipmakers can get more chips from a single wafer, reducing manufacturing costs.



© Reuters

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