Intel: Metal in Future Chips = Less Leakage (updated)

securitas writes "Intel is contemplating using metal instead of silicon in future chips for the 'transistor gate, which controls whether a transistor is on or off' and the 'dielectric, an insulating layer below the gate,' which are respectively made of silicon atoms and silicon dioxide. 'Millions of minuscule switches that make up silicon chips leak electricity when they're supposed to be shut off. To compensate, engineers have increased the current, driving up power consumption, decreasing battery life for portable devices and generating more heat.' AMD has also experimented with metal instead of silicon. By moving to metal AMD and Intel expect to reduce electricity leakage. More from AP via SeattlePI and the Miami Herald." Update: 11/05 15:25 GMT by T : Read on below for some information from Intel on why this is a good thing.

gManZboy writes "Following up on the Intel news that about using metal in chips -- here's an explanation from Shekhar Borkar (Intel Research Fellow) about why heat, power, and sub-threshold leakage, not transistor size, are the real challenges to Moore's law. Apparently, in order to make chips much faster, we're going to have to pump more electricity in then anything else in our houses -- and they'll soon be as hot as a nuclear reactor -- no, really."

Comments

Re:What about...

[October_30th]

Intense lobbying, FUD and outright threats from the diamond industry have managed to suppress any large scale production of perfect diamonds (you can't do chips using crude industrial grade diamonds).

You see, diamonds are seriously overpriced luxury items. Although it is possible to manufacture cheap diamonds that are indistinguishable from the natural ones, it has never been done. Why? It would ruin the entire business model of De Beers & co. which is based on artificial scarcity. That's why they'd fight such projects to the bitter end.

Gee, moving back to metal gate fabrication?

[dido]

My course in VLSI design was many, many years in the past, but what I do remember is that early integrated circuits used metal gates in the fabrication process. That process was later abandoned in favor of polysilicon because poly was much easier to work with at smaller feature sizes (I'm a bit foggy on this one). Gee, so now we're going back to metal gate processes, and we'll have real metal-oxide-semiconductor field effect transistors again?

If this is becoming easier to do at deep submicron level, I suppose processes for making deep submicron feature-sized Gallium-Arsenide MESFET's also got easier? Now wouldn't we just love to have such GaAs chips on our desktops... (I do know I'm forgetting another difficulty in working with GaAs, anyone care to remind me why GaAs is not as common as silicon today?)