Intel’s next-gen transistors to hit shops by 2008

Intel Corporation, the world’s largest computer chip maker has announced its next generation level of transistors; and the surprising element is that they will have metal and not silicon grade electrodes.
The chips will have insulating walls made of a "high-K" hafnium compound, which is transparent to electric fields, instead of silicon dioxide, Intel said in a statement.
According to New Scientist, the changes mean that the 45-nanometre transistors on Intel's next suite of computer processors will not only be faster and smaller than today's 65-nanometre ones, but will also be more power efficient.
"The implementation of high-k and metal materials marks the biggest change in transistor technology since the introduction of polysilicon gate transistors in the late 1960s," said Intel co-founder Gordon Moore.
The new transistors will make their way into Intel's next generation products, currently codenamed "Penryn", which include the Core 2 Duo, Core 2 Quad and Xeon processors. These will run Windows Vista, Mac OS X, Windows XP and Linux, he said.
The manufacturing will begin later in 2007 and the products will be available in 2008.
Dan Hutcheson, an analyst with VLSI Research in California, US said: "It's no longer a research project, it's real. This is a really big breakthrough".
A transistor consists of an electrode that switches the current on and off within a "channel" using an electric field.
In the past, to make the transistor switch faster, and thereby up its performance, chipmakers shortened the electrode and thinned the insulating wall that separated it from the channel, but this was not very suitable, as thinning the wall often caused current to leak from the channel into the electrode, wasting heat and electricity.
Now, in an effort to continue shrinking and speeding up its transistors, Intel has come up with an insulator that transmits a fast-switching electric field even at a relatively large size.
Though the exact composition of this "high-K" material is a secret, Intel has said it contains hafnium, which increases transistor-switching speed by 20 percent and leaks five times less current.
According to Intel, the new 45-nanometre transistors dual-core processors will contain 400 million transistors, while quad-core will contain 800 million.



Source:Hindustanis.org