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

Heat dissipation?

[Marx_Mrvelous]

I wonder what temperatures these will function under. Personally, I want to see light-based chips, due to what I hope will be a huge reduction of heat loss.

Then again, on cold winter days it's nice to have a 900MHz space heater.

Re:Heat dissipation?

[rossy]

I'm guessing that at these small geometries, the heat per transistor is smaller due to the small currents involved. However the thermal density and switching speeds might wipe out all this gain. It's heat density per unit area that is making these chips efficient space heaters. I too like light-based chips. However there is a significant amount of energy required to lase the light in a laser diode. This keeps getting more efficient. I expect as Infiniband technologies pick up, there will be more and more folks playing with light, and we will start seeing some inroads in this area. I have stock in Corning. I figure they know glass cookware, so they should do OK making glass cable.

Only a ten-fold increase?

[_DMan_]

ten-fold increase...not planned for until 2009 at earliest

Sounds like the rate of increasing performance is starting to drop. Isn't it supposed to double every 18 months? Shouldn't we then expect a 25 times increase between now and 2009? (2^(7years * 12months/18months))

Hope they have some other tricks to make chips faster!

The important thing to remember is *reliability*

[Anonymous Coward]

While it's wonderful that they can create a 300fs inverter, you also have to consider that they have yet to prove that they can actually mass-produce these structures to get adequate yields. This is not a trivial operation. Bell Labs, IBM, Intel, and AMD have all announced ultra-small and/or ultra-fast transistor structures, but they all admit that they are far from mass-producing them on a wafer/die.

Also - the rest of the componentry in a computer or other electronic structure, and how it will all communicate all of these calculations, will also be a problem. Already, integrated circuit I/O circuits are having trouble transporting data back and forth on a PCB.

ALSO, consider that the photolithography tools that are supposed to support the next generation of smaller structures are already off-track. 157nm lithography tools have been delayed due to development and financial difficulties. See SiliconStrategies.com). My personal guess is that the vertical MOSFETs will be the winners in the short term because, until they get other factors in line, they will have to make do with what they've got, though *again* the additional processing required for the wafer will impact yields, so it will be an expensive technology to implement either way.

Re:In other words� exactly as predicted 30 years a

[Anonymous Coward]

And an AC has to point out basic math:

130 to 65 is four times the density. Likewise with 65 to 32 and 32 to 16. Of course, you could also go by the twelve-month rule.