Intel touts breakthrough in chip insulation

P>Elinor Mills Abreu

SAN FRANCISCO: Intel Corp. said on it has found a breakthrough way to insulate transistors that could solve one of the semiconductor industry's most fundamental problems: how to make computer chips ever-smaller while preventing them from losing power and throwing off heat.

As semiconductor manufacturers design microprocessors packed more densely with transistors, those components, which are the fundamental building blocks of computer chips, are also prone to leak electrical current, much like a dripping faucet.

That means that more powerful chips also drain power, cutting into battery life and throwing off heat, making laptops hot to the touch and forcing companies to set up expensive cooling systems for server computers.

To solve the problem, Intel said it has come up with a new insulating material for transistors to replace the silicon dioxide that has been used as the industry standard for about 30 years.

"The power problem is the most significant problem the industry faces now," said Rob Willoner, a technology analyst at Intel, the world's largest chip maker. "This is a redesign of transistors, the fundamental building block of all computing chips."

As more transistors are added, the silicon dioxide insulation -- already only a few atomic layers thick -- gets so thin that electrical current leaks out.

Intel's new solution, which will be unveiled at a technical forum in Tokyo on Thursday, is a thicker material called "high-k dielectric" that allows the transistor to operate without leaking current, Willoner said.

To make chips more powerful, Intel and rivals have squeezed in more and more transistors -- the millions of tiny switches on a chip that flip on and off millions of times per second -- onto smaller areas.

For example, Intel's original Pentium processor in 1993 had 3.1 million transistors. Today's Pentium 4 has 55 million transistors and processors in 2007 are expected to have 1 billion or more on the same size piece of silicon, which is a bit smaller than a small postage stamp, Intel said.

This trajectory is known as "Moore's Law" after Intel co-founder Gordon Moore, who predicted in 1965 that the number of transistors on chips would double every 18 months or so. The performance gains have fueled huge advances in computer calculating power at ever lower costs.

In February, Moore predicted that his observation would hold true for another decade or so. But he cautioned that power leakage, needed to be addressed first to reduce heat levels of densely packed transistors, which are "not far from the power density of a nuclear reactor." Because the new insulating material is not compatible with the existing silicon-based gate electrode that determines whether the transistor is on or off, Intel will be using metal for new gate electrodes, Willoner said.

The company is not disclosing the composition of the new insulating materials.

Intel said it is on track to put the new transistor design into volume production by 2007, around the same time as it begins using the 45-nanometer manufacturing process technology.

The nanometer size refers to spacing of circuitry on chips, with 130 nanometer being standard today.

The Santa Clara, California company will unveil its new transistor design at a technical forum, the International Gate Insulator Workshop, in Tokyo on Thursday.

Reuters