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Intel Claims 10Ghz Transistor
Professional Wild-Eyed Visionary writes: "Intel has developed a new CMOS chip technology
that cranks out 10Ghz, 400 million transistors per
chip, with each transistor only 3 atoms thick,
previously thought impossible. See story
at
Dial Electronics
" While this story's rather fluffy, it makes it sound like Intel is a few years ahead of it's earlier projection of reaching 10Ghz by 2005. Of course, maybe they meant integrated into actual chips;) (in which case 2005 still sounds nice).
Actually, academics have created 100GHz transistors out of GaAs. 10GHz isn't that great compared to these ultra-fast ones
However, the distinction may be that this is the fastest corporate-built transistor, and it might be the first semi-integrable one. I don't know the details of either development.
Maybe this is using Si? I forget the frequency limit of silicon, but this may be the fastest silicon transistor ever built.
A new year calls for a new signature.
It may max out at 10GHz or so.
However gallium arsenide, indium something,
have potential considerably beyond 10GHz and
are being used for high speed D/A and optical
connections. The problem with the non-silicon
stuff is they are harder to fabricate in very
high integration. They tend to be two or more
integration genrations behind CMOS.
IIRC, there have been 8GHz transistors (or mosfets) available for a few years now. Nowhere near that small, but they exist. I think this is more a publicity stunt from Intel, trying to claw back some custom from AMD.
My physics is a bit rusty, but if I'm not mistaken these 3-atomic layer thick transistors must have some problems because at this level the predictability of atom movement comes into play.
Every atom has a certain frequent movement. Objects consisting of a large number of atoms stay in one place because the movement of all those atoms combined adds up to zero.
Theoretically, it's not impossible that your dinnertable would suddenly be a couple of meters away from its original place. But it's the statistics that make such an event impossible in practice.
When creating objects very small - consisting of only a few atoms - the movement of every atom get's more important. Chances that the movement of one or more atoms influences the behavior of the object itself (in a way that its behavior is not predictable anymore) are a reality when creating transitors this small.
Therefore I'm amazed by the comment of the Intel scientist that these transistors behave just like other - bigger - devices.
A 10Ghz transister can only make a 10Ghz CPU if each pipeline stage (plus sync overhead) is only a single transister. Which is pretty impossable (a simple flip flop is several transistors, an adder is a big pile of them). As I recall the failed 500Mhz PowerPC that some compony like "eXponential" was making was thought to be extreamly aggressave with only 50 or so transitor delays between pipe stages (and some pipe stages were mostly wire delay to get the signals from one part of the chip to another!). Or maybe I'm confusing that with sombody or others barrel processer style MediaCPU (also out of bisness).
Tiny transistors are wonderflu. Tiny fast transistors are more wonderful. But 10Ghz transistors are no where close to letting you make a 10Ghz CPU. In fact it might be slower then current state of the art (but smaller). Something in this story doesn't add up.
Intel realise that they are no longer the kings of the chip game. With their recent P4 release being a total failure, it is only a matter of time before AMD takes over their current position in the market. Releasing this kind of "news" only shows that they are simply trying to play the pr game, rather than actually focusing on proper R and D like AMD and Transmeta
This is the frequency band that mobile phones use (GSM 900) so couldn't there be problems with interference, and public hype along the lines of mobile phone radiation.
Also at these sort of frequencies you have to use microstrip waveguides to carry your signals, as standard wires don't work so good, so would interconnects and the like have to be redesigned?
Anyway, most computers are limited by memory bandwidth nowadays, and 10GHz chips only makes this worse. To get performance up a lot it would probably be better to improve the memory clock by a factor of ten than the raw processor speed.
I trust independent research labs like Advanced Prototype Packet-Layer Engineering to do my benchmarks. They do quality work.
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Making flat structures (gates oxides) 3 layers thick isn't that hard. What's hard is to make them that thick over the whole wafer and to make a working transistor (they claim the latter). The lateral structures are 30nm which is approx. 100 atom layers wide. Reducing lateral structure size is a lot harder.
Somehow I can't see how the speed of the transistors can help with the fact that you usually have to wait until the end of sentences before translating, you cannot just do it word by word.
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