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IBMs CMOS 9S
TigeR writes "I saw over at 3DNews that IBM has just unvieled some new chipmaking technology. " Its called CMOS 99:"copper wiring, silicon-on-insulator (SOI) transistors and improved, "low-k dielectric" " All this and 0.13 microns. Smaller chips with more punch using less electricity. Everybody wins. Gimme now.
IBM's announcement
The Register article concerning 10 GHz Power PC processors.
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A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
...the linux substrate registry won't correctly identify this manufacturing process.
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I still think Pringles lead in chip technology. How do they make them so perfect?
GONE FISHING
It's a shame that news like this so seldom gets people excited anymore. "They made a faster, smaller microchip!? Who would have thought it?" Leaps in technology like this, however, don't happen automatically. There are researchers busting their asses daily trying to squeeze every last drop of performance out of hardware.
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According to the article on The Reg, this technology is going to be used in a 10GHz PowerPC chip, and maybe a G3 or G4 follow on.
The next Cmdr Taco duplicate will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
The IBMlogic and DRAM processes are somewhat separated because they are drive by different needs. DRAM is driven almost exclusively by density and cost. Logic is driven by performance and wirability. The big sharing point between the two is in the photolithography development.
Incidentally, DRAM is unlikely to move into SOI any time soon, because the raw wafers have too many defects. For ordinary circuits that class of defects doesn't really matter, but when you're trying to store fewer than 50,000 electrons for 64,000,000 nS, they can kill.
DRAM is much better off in bulk or epi silicon, rather than SOI. Besides, there's so much density and cost pressure that relatively crude, slow devices are used. Even if one wanted to pay for faster transistors, it wouldn't do you much good. The paramount need to shut off the switch into the DRAM cell (so it can hold that 0 or 1) means that particular transistor *can't* be optimized for performance, and that one link can quickly become the performance-dominating factor. In other words, it isn't terribly cost-effective for an ordinary DRAM to pay for fast transistors.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Those researchers don't get the respect they deserve because normal people don't rate those breakthroughs as high, because the need for such technical progression, from their point of view, is simply not graspable for them. It's not as apparent anymore, because the applicaitons they use allready run.. on a functional level, computers have little more to offer, it can only get faster and easier to use, but that's about it.
So sure, in the good old days, people cared to go from 16 mhz to 40. Even though that was a small step, together with a few other enhancements to the system architecture, it made windows 3.11 a reality (I'm not trying to say windows is my criterium for progression here, it's just the OS I used back then).
Now clockspeeds jump from 1.1ghz to 1.5ghz or whatever, but John Doe doesn't care about this.. he cares about reading his email now. Windows 2000 runs fine on his 166 or 180, he doesn't really need "faster", that is just a convenience that 'happens automatically when you buy a new pc". The ones who need "faster" are the ones playing games, like his kids perhaps, but then you also see that todays games and gamesystems are shifting allmost completely into a dedicated market. PS2, DC, Xbox,..
I'm NOT saying chipmakers should stop getting on with their new designs and research. *I* WANT these fast things as much as the next guy who likes to game every now and then. But to most people, the difference between 1.1 and 1.5 means as much as the difference between windows 98 and 98OSR2 I think.
Still, *clap* *clap* for Big Blue!.. the one minute it's Intel topping the charts, the next it's IBM.. seems like technology deathmatch at times..
With great power comes great electricity bills.
You can find more information from IBM here and here.
...is to pump out 512 MB and 1 GB RAM chips. If the process can be done in a conventional fab facility, it shouldn't take more than year or two. RAM is, as solid state devices go, among the simpler things to make. (It's still complicated as hell, but not compared to processors or whatnot. That's why RAM has a lifetime warranty.) However, I have no clue as to whether or not most mobo's would support a RAM chip of that capacity.
And if I'm way off on the semiconductor stuff, I'd be as interested as anyone to find what's correct.
Evan