Intel Cites Breakthrough In Transistor Design

n3hat was one of many who wrote in to tell us about the following: "Saw this report in Siliconvalley.com, 'Intel has devised a new structure for transistors that could lead to microprocessors that run faster and consume less power than conventional ones. The technology solves two of the more intractable problems: power consumption and heat.' It goes on to say that Intel plans to present two major elements of the new "TeraHertz" transistor structure at the International Electron Device Meeting in Washington on Dec. 3.

Comments

IBM and AMD First

[sabinm]

NPR had a report on this eariler today regarding this
"Terahertz" chip. It seems both IBM and AMD had developed this technology and Intel snubbed it, citing that it was to expensive to implement. There is nothing breakthrough about "fast switching" electrons, just the fact that INTEL released a press story about it makes it interesting. Ho hum

Okay, now what about gate delay?

[Erich]

We expect that transistors keep getting smaller, and faster about the same rate as they get smaller. Gate delays are (looking out 5 to 10 years) not a big worry.

The big worry is wire speed. Wires aren't getting much faster, even though dies are getting larger and clock frequencies are getting faster. It used to be that getting from point A to point B on a chip was no problem to do at the end of a clock cycle. Current processors are getting to be so fast that you can't get from one place to another in a whole clock cycle in some cases. Unlike transistors, wire delay gets worse as size gets smaller, because resistance goes up fast (scales with cross-sectional area), and wire delay is proportional to R*C. You can do some tricks to keep wire speed the same, but relative to switching speed and transistor size it still gets bad quickly.

Routing information around is the problem of the future. You get free computation on the way, but getting from point A to B is the hard part.

That being said, fast-switching, low-power transistors are nice. :-)

And, for all you patent-ballyhooers, Intel will patent this (probably). As they should. Other companies will license this patent from Intel in the same way that Intel licenses patents on other aspects of their processes from other companies. That's the way things work.