Intel Moving Forward With 10nm, Will Switch Away From Silicon For 7nm

An anonymous reader writes: Intel has begun talking about its plans for future CPU architectures. The company is already working on a 10nm manufacturing process, and expects the first such chips to be ready by early 2017. Beyond that, things are getting difficult. Intel says it will need to move away from silicon when it develops a 7nm process. "The most likely replacement for silicon is a III-V semiconductor such as indium gallium arsenide (InGaAs), though Intel hasn't provided any specific details yet." Even the current 14nm chips they're making ran into unexpected difficulties. "While Intel didn't provide any specifics, we strongly suspect that we're looking at the arrival of transistors based on III-V semiconductors. III-V semiconductors have higher electron mobility than silicon, which means that they can be fashioned into smaller and faster (as in higher switching speed) transistors."

Comments

amazing

[schlachter]

Amazing that we're getting to 7nm, and rather than saying we can't do it, there's just casual talk about how they will have to switch away from silicone. Really incredible. Will they just keep marching forward to less than 7nm and into other exotic configs?

Re:amazing

[DrTJ]

From Metal-Pages:

In: $600/kg
Ga: $220/kg

vs

Si: $3/kg

The material part of the cost of the chip is likely to go up. I think however, that part today is minuscle,
so that part of the price impact with be small. However, I do think the volume benefits to Si technology
(50 years of development and industrial support, and with 13 gazillion Si units produced every year)
will be very, very hard to beat with any III-V technology. There's so much new stuff to be done: defect
density, passivation, via technology, lithography chemistry etc. The investment in III-V to reach current Si
position will be huge and ultimately paid by the customers with higher unit prices.

To answer your question

[ciaran2014]

Nope. They've decided to hit 7nm and then call it a day.

Re: To answer your question

[Anonymous Coward]

That would be a really tiny computer.....

Re:To answer your question

[Anne Thwacks]

Just translate them on the fly, as they've been doing for years.

You can, and people do. However, the issue is not translating one x86 instruction to one [insert ISA here] instruction. That has been done since x86 was invented, and was common with previous ISAs before that. The real requirement is to translate source code that maps to a bunch of x86 instructions into ONE [trendy ISA] instruction. This will obviously be easier if x86 is thrown out the window.

Historical note: x86 is a bastadised rip-off of the PDP11 instruction set. The PDP11 was built as a "hardware Fortran machine" ie one instruction represents one Fortan instruction as far as was achievable in 1970. C is (just one) PDP11 assembly language! The VAX instruction set was an attempt to achieve a higher level machine code, which worked quite well - most VAX assembly instructions are actually function calls to application specific microcode.

X86 was a poor ISA when the first 8086 chips were made (but good, given hardware capabilities at the time). That was about 40 years ago. MIPS and Sparc (and ARM) are all better than x86.

The moral of this story is that it is "first past the post" in this game, cos people hate it when their favorite app stops working. (See Great Western Railway, Brunel and 8' gauge).

InGaAs?

[serviscope_minor]

GaAs was the future of super-fast transistors. The Cray 3 was made from GaAs.

GaAs has a much higher electron mobility than silicon, 8,5000 versus about 1,500 for silicon. This allows for much faster switching. InGaAs has an electron mobility of 10,000 allowing even faster switching.

But that's just electrons which are used in P channel MOSFETs. For CMOS, you also need N channel MOSFETS. The kicker is that GaAs and InGaAs have respectively lower and much lower hole mobility so the N channel FETs switch rather slower than silicon.

CMOS is by far the only architecture. Historically it is the most power efficient since it only spends energy switching. On high speed, small scale CMOS, however, lots of power goes into the switching itself, the switching is fast enough that the devices don't really act very ideally and there's a lot of leakage.

Perhaps at very extreme ends, other architectures can compete, power wise.

Re:Resource wars

[Troed]

Despite their name, rare earth elements (with the exception of the radioactive promethium) are relatively plentiful in Earth's crust, with cerium being the 25th most abundant element at 68 parts per million (similar to copper). However, because of their geochemical properties, rare earth elements are typically dispersed and not often found concentrated as rare earth minerals in economically exploitable ore deposits.[3] It was the very scarcity of these minerals (previously called "earths") that led to the term "rare earth".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...