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Double-Gate Transistors
democritus writes "Scientific
American is reporting that IBM has made a
new double-gate transistor" As transistors become
shorter, current bleeds through them when they are supposed
to be off. The new design should enable anything down to 25 nm
long transistors. Currently transistors are 250 nm long, but
to attain higher speeds, circuit designers often use fatter
transistors which can drive a wire to a high or low state (binary 1 and 0)
faster (hence very hot CPUs). The new design acts as if it
doubled the length of the transistor, enabling higher speed
circuits in the same area. Finally, because each transistor
has two gates, a chip using the new transitor could use either
both gates (for fast operation) or a single gate (to save power
for portable applications).
I want a beowulf cluster of those!
Is it just me or is IBM doing some amazing R&D... I beleive (if i'm not mistaken) they where the first to come up with copper cpu technology along with those new 340Mb HD that are the size of an egg and these new transistors.........
IBM has some experienced researchers that get
lots of money to research whatever they damn
well please. These people get plenty of support
and not much PHB interference.
I'd love to get paid to research whatever I like.
Intel is known for intentionally getting rid of
older employees. Intel has a very stressful
performance review system that is abused to get
rid of employees that don't toe the line. In such
an environment, nobody would want to do research
that won't be obviously successful. Failure is
not tolerated, so why take risks?
IBM is a giant in R&D. They get about 5 patents a day!
Notice how they are constantly creating new technology that could change alot of things, make them alot faster, and do alot of other great things, but they never, ever, ever actually use them? Does this piss anyone else off besides me?
yep. amid all these bogus "new technologies", IBM seems to deliver some real stuff (i wonder if i can get a job as coffee boy for these researchers? ;-) btw, anything new from Bell Labs lately?
(one of these days, i'll get an account...)
boing!
Trust me, if there's money to be made off these innoviations, they will do their damndest to make it. Don't think they R&D for fun. :)
-denon
Having been a PPC fan since its conception, I can't wait to see this technology turn up in G5 or G6 processors.
Of course, it isn't the PPC chip that needs speed-or-power-consumption enhancements. Many PPC chips already outrun their Pentium counterparts at the same clock speed, and they are perfectly suited to laptop and other portable applications, even at full speed, unlike the Pentium II's which must be slowed to keep its power consumption reasonable.
Let's hope these transistors make it into the next generation of PPC's... between this, copper-wiring, Motorola's ATX mobo's for PPC chips, and LinuxPPC, we should be able to put that antiquated x86 platform six feet under for once and for good while we do the same to Microsoft in the software realm.
It's a long-overdue revolution, if you ask me.
IBM is coming out with a lot of new technologies because it has a lot of divisions.. and they're attracting good people. and who says monopoly stifles compeition? sure IBM and Motorola're the kings of the PowerPC industdry they have no compeitiors other than each other and yet they still innovate... but if you ask me, it seems like IBM is coming out with a lot more inventions than motorola has... Now only if apple could convince them to share technologies again we'd have copper chips with SOI and Altivec and other stuff... Now if linuxPPC could use the Altivec instructions, it'd rock!
Oh just bite my wang you stupid fucking Mac moron.
SK8RBOI
as an "old hand" i find the political bullshit boring. more tech stuff!
UP TO 25nm. ie. Any size up to the limit of 25nm. You can't go beyond 25nm (any smaller).
I guess it may be a bit confusing, but that is what they are implying.
Martin Minkus
Crash & Burn inc. CEO
diskiller@cnbinc.com
Why isn't Intel leading this new charge in chip design/manufacturing? Think about it for a minute. Because of their de-facto PC monopoly with Microsoft, Intel hasn't faced any real market pressure to innovate in years. Their main mission has been to provide increased speed while retaining x86 compatibility. Where's the drive to innovate in that?
On the other hand, IBM is a former major player that got frozen out of the PC hardware/OS wars. It's been a long and hard-fought battle, but they're fighting their way back into the forefront. They have the capital, drive and resources to do so. Even more importantly, they are free to innovate rather than play sidekick to Microsoft. Go Big Blue!
Anyone else think moving to MacOS X / LinuxPPC might be a good idea? In 3-5 years IBM will be making processors with AltiVec, copper tecchnology, SOI, silicon germanium and this and who knows what else. Sell your Intel stock while you still can. Merced is going nowhere and I think they've already reached a point of diminishing returns with throwing money at the x86 R&D. IBM may introduce 466MHz processors March 1st, which would put them right on Intel's tail in terms of MHz. G4 is gonna especially gonna rule the laptop world, where processors that run with little power or heat dissipation are a godsend(thank you copper).
You gotta love Big Blue!
indeed! i agree as well
Yeah!
They dont NEED to use it yet when there are lots of customers perfectly willing to buy existing technology :>
HP's McKinley is shaping up to be a pretty damned good processor. Even Intel know's that Merced is already done. It's basically a marketing ploy. On the other hand, McKinley (also IA-64) should make a pretty big impact.
Sure, IBM has some great fab technology, but (unfortunately) if it's not used to make x86 compatable CPUs, it's going to have a hard time succeeding...
Why do you want to replace x86, which is being produced by several companies. With PPC which is only being made by Motorola. No competition is worse on the market place than an inferior design.
IBM seems to come up with quite a lot of new stuff. It's nice to see that some companies can still innovate.
And Microsoft has, what, a 5 billion dollar R&D budget, and the best they can come up with is re-hashing someone else's 22 year old technology and calling it "Microsoft ClearType"? Talk about a complete inability to innovate. Shame, it must be quite frustrating for Bill to see how pathetically incapable of innovation his company is.
They also helped design the atari jaguar so not :)
everything they do is awesome
But seriously IBM has been making great advances
in the computer industry for years. And they will
probably keep making them for years to come.
Besides, the jag might not have been so bad if the
games didn't suck so much. Then again the Saturn's
games were fun and they got their butt kicked too.
Actually, the teleportation theory is *NOT* zero propogation time. It actually involves the creation of another particle with exactly identical quantum properties as the original. This isn't instantaneous communication; you still need to transfer a carrier particle between the two sites, and that particle can't travel faster than light.
... ...
However, if you're looking for instantaneous communication, there's this theory I've been working on in my spare time...
Luser, learn a little about what you're talking about would you?
ClearType isn't 22 year old technology. Even Steve Gibson realizes that - he's just too much of a hypocrit to admit it.
Look at his website - http://grc.com
Look at the cleartype stuff.
First he goes on about how it's all "Apple technology from 22 years ago"
Then in his OWN implementation, he realizes that this isn't actually the case, and goes on for a while about low-pass filtering, and how to improve the quality.
What a hypocrit! So let's see - is it 22 year old technology, or is there a lot more to it than that? You can't have it both ways you know.
Also, 99% of MS research isn't ready for prime-time; it's research, very blue-sky stuff.
Go to http://research.microsoft.com and take a look. You might come away enlightened - and if it rubs off on you, with a bit more intelligence.
(Also, look at the publications that the MS research team publish in - they don't patent much of that work, they just publish it)
Hey, watch me crawl into a little hole and never say anything about MS ever again, just because you told me to shut up. Free speech .. whats that? Never heard of it. Yay! I love oppression! Turn a blind eye! Don't pay any attention to the man behind the curtain! Bring back the inquisition! If I don't like what someone else is saying, then they sure as hell better not say it!
.. well .. TOUGH SHIT! That is not my problem.
/. ISNT QUITE THE PLACE FOR YOU, *DUH*. Go read www.microsoft.com or zdnet or whatever. In a place like /. anti-MS statements are unavoidable, so put up or shut up.
I can say whatever the hell I want about MS. If you don't like it
If I had 5 billion dollars to spend on R&D, you'd be DAMN SURE I'd be coming up with FAR MORE than MS has come up with.
If you don't like reading statements about the wrongdoings of MS, then perhaps, have you considered, that
Did nobody else notice that this article is about FETs, but the description of how a transistor works was of a dual-junction (NPN or PNP) type transistor?
It seems like this is a really good development if they can make it work, because having dual electordes for the shut off field should reduce the switching voltage somewhat, which is a good thing for both speed and heat reasons.
I'm really disappointed with you all.
-andrew "I wonder what my passwords for the accounts I've created here are." andrewb@cs.washington.edu
There is an inevitable lag between a scientific breakthrough and a commercial product. You hear about lots of improvements in memory technology, but you don't hear that those same improvements go into making 64Mb SDRAMS available 3 years later. You hear about better and better die resolution but don't make the connection between that and AMD's K6-2 which runs faster and cooler than anything that came before it. You hear about glass hard drive platters which would spin faster, be more resistant to damage due to head crashes, store more data, and be more shock resistant and don't make the connection between that and drives which hold 30Gb, have seek times of 8ms, and last for decades of continous use. You read about advances in display technology, but don't make the connection between that and the plummetting price of flat panel displays.
.1 micron dies may seem pretty nifty today, but in a couple of years when you buy that cool running 2 Ghz processor for your 256 Mb system with a 200 Gb drive and a 21 inch color gas plasma display you won't be thinking about how awesome your system is, you will be thinking that life would be better if only you could scrape together $300 to replace that damn dinosaur and get a real computer.
Scientific discoveries make bumps, but they get smoothed out into a curve of gradual improvement. Moore's law isn't some natural curve which would be irrelevant if only the evil corporations didn't horde their knowledge, it is the result of a continuous series of breakthroughs which look impressive when they are made, but are yawned at when they actually make it to the marketplace.
The current rate of performance improvement in hardware is not just boring incremental refinement, it is astounding. Scientific breakthroughs happening at such a consistent rate that they become invisible, and all people see is a performance curve which they assume is par for the course.
Copper semiconductors and
Well I use Linux to access /. And I strongly dislike MS business practices. And if I want to say, then I AM GOING TO, and I DONT CARE if some weenie tells me "shut up". And, in case you live in a tiny little box or something, you might have noticed that probably the majority of Linux users are anti-MS. If I look like a zealot, I don't care. And if you tell me to shut up because of it, then I CARE EVEN LESS.
/.ers are using Windows to read the page - but on polls, Linux/Unix users are in the majority --- get a clue. Hint: these people aren't all just lying.
And I know quite a bit about what R&D MS does. Here's a tip: avoid making ridiculous assumptions about other people while debating that you can't prove that will very likely turn out to be wrong. It makes you look like a twit.
Why don't you visit research.microsoft.com yourself, and let them boldly tell you on the front page that one of the coolest things to come out of their EXTREMELY expensive research, is a dancing paperclip. Then come back and tell me that the "financial input"/"research output" ratio at MS R&D is reasonable -- with a straight face!
And do yourself a favour, see if you are actually capable of thinking -- and go think about possible reasons why most
And then there's SOI (silicon-on-insulator)...
I wonder, though, since they're beginning to show that they can do chip fab'ing pretty well, why (as I recall) they Pentithangs (Blue Lightning?) bit.
Or perhaps I misremember.
Like, wow.. I think..
wired? march 99? its not march yet?
They ship them to subscribers a month in advance. It's got Jeff Bezos (the amazon.com guy) on the cover.
Because PPC, which is made by Motorola and IBM and, at one point, Exponential, already has areas in which it is faster than x86, and already is significantly more energy-efficient than x86. :)
Therefore, although Pentiums need these speed and efficiency improvements far more, they can't have them because IBM makes PPCs (and lots of other things besides), and therefore we want to 'replace' x86 by having really solid competition come up and basically obliterate x86 in performance.
The fact that this will give people three main options- MacOS, LinuxPPC and Be- is icing on the cake. Support for x86 == support for Intel, and Microsoft. Support for PPC is far more likely to drive Linux, simply because not everybody wants to use MacOS
Screw ATX mobos, it's time for a PPC based Netwinder >;) that sets out from the start to tap into the cost savings of aiming for Linux from the beginning. _That_ would be the future.
Apple's kinda cool- they oscillate between sucking horribly and being totally cool. Did you hear that now Sys7.5 is available on the web for download at no cost, same with sys6 and sys7.1? That you can download the rather unixish MPW development environment, with the same compilers as used to compile MacOS itself, also at no cost? That Apple is supporting OpenGL and aiming to make _that_ available to developers and users at no cost also? (note avoidance of 'free'! ;) ) ;) :) yay!) have explicitly said they will not blindly copy the bits of VB that suck, even if they are begged to by suits and VB weenies ;) ;) it dualboots with a terrific little control panel app that's super convenient (or open firmware if you insist on not dualbooting MacOS), and the hardware is more predictable so it's easier to set up and maintain. I can't say enough good things about LinuxPPC- I just love it, and my first experiences with Linux have been linuxish, sometimes frustrating (unixgeekery novice here), but in the end rewarding- it did not defeat me, in fact I got to where I understood and loved it. ;) and hey, Apple's not so bad either! Dualboot to it for games, or when you want to just passively webbrowse. MacOS Navigator 4.06 is dead stable...
Any half competent Linux hacker can make a version of MacOS 8, 8.1, 8.5 sit up and do tricks. You only have to do a bit of research, and make sure MS doesn't have a place on your box for anything. There's an active software ecology with lots of developers (hell, even game developers!) getting by writing Mac software. You don't hear about them any more than you hear about Linux developers in the Doze mags, but they are out there, lots of them.
There are even GPLed Mac software programs- I know this for a fact 'cos _I_ write 'em
There's a rapid IDE Basic out there just in the last two years or so called REALbasic, written by an Australian who's moved to Texas. REALbasic is absolutely phenomenal, and though it's vaguely syntax compatible with VB, the vendors (six people in Texas! Not counting the coder's newborn baby daughter
And, of course, there's LinuxPPC. I think this may be the most approachable path to Linux you can get short of buying a prebuilt x86 box with Linux on
Isn't that what all this is about, in the end?
SUPPORT PPC AND LINUXPPC
Posted by JosephKer:
Up to is entirely correct. 25nm is the limit; therefore, we can move up to the implied limit.
Posted by Bill, the Galactic Hero:
Although I'm not sure -- Won't it be a little harder to create charge-inversion layers at the oxide-semiconductor interfaces, since there's no back-bias on channel? I mean, normally the body contact is used to pin the voltage on the back of the channel, which reduces the body effect.
Now your body effect comes back, it seems. So I wonder if the transconductance per channel isn't quite what you'd get with a normal MOSFET. That would mean that a two-channel MOSFET wouldn't match a normal normal MOSFET with a double-width gate.
"Free" , in the case of cell phones, is meaningless. Dealers pay quite a bit of money for them. They make it back in spades by making you sign a contract for service. They get a part of that service fee for as long as the contract lasts, and possibly as long as you use the phone.
Cell phones are, in no sense, free.
Why? Can you refute any of his points?
It's far easier to forgive your enemy after you get even with him.
I wouldn't put too much faith in the Motorola mobos. They are way too expensive. $2400 for a 300MHz 604e motherboard and $3800 for a dual 333MHz is pretty bad. We need someone to develop a cheap motherboard based on the powerPC.
Ways to make it cheaper:
Use IDE instead of SCSI.
Standard DIMMS (SDRAM)
Stick to PCI (no ISA slots or bridge chips)
Use standard AGP slot
ship with a standard BGA ZIF socket so you can buy a G3 or G4
Use USB, parrallel, firewire
It's far easier to forgive your enemy after you get even with him.
IBM publishes an amazing amount of research results, not all of which even get patented, so they effectively make a lot of things available free.
If it allows anything up to 25nm, does that mean it allows 20nm, 2nm, 0.0002nm, etc.?
--
Matthew Sachs
matthewg@interport.net
Considering Intel invented the damn chip, yeah. It's an example of PHB's at Intel more concerned with short-term profits. IBM is a collossus -- they still dwarf Microsoft, and at IBM, lifetime employment for their researchers at least is still a reality.
Hell, this is the same company that's been doing research in *teleportation*. Fast propogation time? How's zero grab ya?
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
Alot of the stuff that gets anounced these days contains what the SEC likes to call "forward looking statements". Hehehe. Also known as: "Me and da boys got it to work in the back lab, when the planets aligned, while standing on one foot."
In other words, the stuff is still in BIG TIME development. In case you didn't read the story, they note that while they might have a possible manufacturing process, there are innumerable checks to make, things to do, etc.
Businesses don't just put out stuff because it's cool, or neat. They put it out when the economics of production make sense for the market. Since this technology will undoubtably require major reworking at the Fab level (and we all know they run $10-20 billion to construct these days), this isn't something that's going to happen overnight. Like the story says, maybe by 2010.
So stop whining about conspiracies. /. sometimes sounds like a bunch of X-Files groupies stuck in Roswell, NM.
There are always four sides to every story: your side, their side, the truth, and what really happened.
Wow it is nice to see someone here who know a bit about electronics (I am an EE myself) and understands technology...
.. isn't that when the e- going from s to d has no barrier and it becomes like a wire with a small resistance...
I imagine that next year the P II's will be dropping in price and I'll finally go and get a DUAL P II (or maybe a quad?) at about the price that I bought my P 233MMX's this year. I also imagine that with smaller transistors well have PII 5600+ Mhz CPU's....
punchthru
cool tech
Only 'flamers' flame!
Some things IBM(among others) have researched that you are currently using...
The ultra dense disc drives currently sold and used. OF course it isn't the absolute densest, but no one would pay for that until the data becomes overwhelming! With their magneto-resistive technologies, IBM changed the hard disc industry.
IBM also pioneered the phase variation and modulation of multiple optical data layers. They had a seven layer CD stack operational; today you will see this in your average DVD drive and disc. IBM also found a way to use copper substrate in their CPUs, and you will see these in newer Apples, as well as in their Power3 and Netfinity servers.
Things invented we use that perhaps IBM didn't do(THey also might have, but I don't know). Sony's(?) ultra high power diode lasers, found in newer DVD drives, rather than conventional IR lasers. Heck, diode lasers period, which are found in CD players. Whoever originally thought lasers were geeky toys probably are regretting it now. IBM has now discovered double gate transistors, for ultra small gates, x-ray lithography, for extra small layout, gallium arsenide transistors, for the ultra fast transistor, and copper substrate, for the ultra efficient wire. Put all 4 together, and expect to see, in a few years, some of the fastest CPUs in the world. Moore's Law is alive, dammit!
If you don't see change fast enough, its because you, and others, including me, don't pay enough in early adoption fees to get this new Technology. That means to see better LCDs, you should go out now and buy a large SGI flat panel. If you want to see better faster processors, go and dump money for a Quad Dec Alpha system; show them there is demand. If you want better faster video, go and buy a VooDoo3 3000 when they get out, or the Riva TNT2, and let them know affordable consumer level devices aren't enough; you want bleeding edge!
AS
-AS
*Pikachu*
I agree totaly with your assesment of the situation. I was ranting mainly because this guy was griping about the slow state of technology...
Miracles were happening under his nose that he didn't realize. I forgot to mention that IBM had a hand in the UPC, the bar code affixed to everything today as well...
Copper is not ultra efficient, you're right. An exaggeration on my part, but it is more efficient and robust than the current aluminum wires =)
I'm wondering if the clever electron lithography technique involves constructive and destructive interference of 'electron waves', or is something else entirely.
I liked your analysis =)
AS
-AS
*Pikachu*
The increased speed of the double gate mosfet is
due to it's behaving as if it's twice as WIDE (doubling the current driving capability), not twice as LONG (which would decrease transconductance for a given gate width). Longer devices are not as prone to drain-source punchthrough, which is a mechanism by which transistors can be stuck "on", so I suppose it is in this sense that the device exhibits the behavior of a longer transistor.
In browsing the comments to this posting I was surprised at the general lack of knowledge concerning the incorporation of research results into products. Where does everyone think the price cuts across almost all consumer electronic product categories come from? Have you opened up a CD player from 1988 and compared it to one from 1998? Sure, they sound the same, but that's the point: a very large amount of research is required to pack the same features and performance into products that sell for less and less. The complexity of a cell phone far exceeds that of many products that do something which seems more "cutting edge" (like the latest video accelerator card), yet many service providers give them away free.
I used the term "punchthrough" to refer to the merging of the drain and source depletion regions, so you're correct...the transistor essentially looks like a resistor (plus all the parasitic capacitances and source/drain diodes)
What will happen to the rest of the Industry. Is IBM going to share its technology with other companies like Intel, Sun, and SGI. I hope they do becuse it would be very good for the computer industry overall.