AMD, IBM Announce Transistor Advances

Jugalator writes: "AMD announces it has built a CMOS transistor with the highest switching speed in the semiconductor history. The transistors are manufactured with .015 micron technology and allows a twenty-fold increase in transistors per chip with a ten-fold increase in performance when compared to the transistors in use today. So far, AMD has only produced a prototype and a larger scale production is not planned for until 2009 at earliest. AMD will announce further information regarding their research in the semiconductor field at the 2001 International Electron Devices Meeting today, December 4." schongo sent in a note about IBM's double-gate transistor. This and the Intel announcement recently are all related to the International Electron Devices Meeting.

Comments

Re:Agian

[Oo.et.oO]

what's wrong with you?
don't you know about design cycles and that they HAVE designed stuff that advances the chips of tomorrow? they did this 5 years ago,

stuff like MOCVD, e-beam lithography, etc, etc, etc.
it takes a LONG time to get transistors into products. Look at SOI and SiGe, the first SiGe HBT was fabricated in ~1970. they are only now making it into products. SOI has been in the works for 10 years, and they are still only using partially depleted channels because of clean interface issues.

Re:Only a ten-fold increase?

[ocelotbob]

Sounds like the rate of increasing performance is starting to drop. Isn't it supposed to double every 18 months?

Repeat after me: Moore's Law had nothing to do with performance. Moore's law states that the amount of transistors doubles every 18 months, not performance. If performance doubled every 18 months, then we would have much, much faster computers today.