by Playfuls Staff |
20th June 2006
Intel co-founder Gordon Moore predicted more than 40 years ago that processors shall double their capacities once in every two years. Since then that prophesy has become known as the "Moore law" and has not yet failed in its predictions.[more]
Recently, Moore's law has been the subject of concern for many scientists, since technical difficulties have appeared to barrier the evolution of chips. Since both major competitors on the chips market, Intel and AMD, have largely implemented the 90-nanometer geometry on their chips, one insurmountable problem comes along: electricity tends to leak out of tiny wires as chip geometry shrinks below 90 nanometers.
At the beginning, to cope with this barrier, IBM came up with a different approach: the carbon nano-tubes. Carbon nano-tubes are extremely thin (their diameter is about 10,000 times smaller than a human hair), hollow cylinders made of carbon atoms.
Depending on their structure, they can be either metals or semiconductors. They are also extremely strong materials and possess good thermal conductivity. The mentioned features have generated strong interest in their possible use in nano-electronic and nano-mechanical devices.
Then, Gordon Moore-founded Intel responded on June 12 with an announcement for the future: they claim they have managed to build an entirely new architecture for chips, called "tri-gate transistors”, which according to Intel will either increase by 45% the speed of its chips or reduce by 35% the energy consumption. These numbers are compared to the company’s current 65-nanometer process transistors.
And now IBM makes its triumphant come-back: researchers from IBM and the Georgia Institute of technology are boasting with the fact that they have broken speed record for silicon-built chips, using a semiconductor that runs 250 times faster than common chips.
The achievement is a major step in the evolution of computer semiconductor technology that could eventually lead to faster networks and more powerful electronics at lower prices, said Bernard Meyerson, vice president and chief technologist in IBM's systems and technology group. According to Meyerson, breakthrough discoveries like this can be implemented into mass production within 24 months.
The technological details look like this: the team of researchers uses a cryogenic station to freeze the chip, achieving a temperature only a few degrees higher than absolute zero (451 degrees below zero Fahrenheit, or minus 268 degrees Celsius, close to the temperature where everything stops moving). This level of cold is obtained with the help of liquid helium and is normally found only in outer space.
The freezing conditions have permitted the chip to run at a staggering speed of 500 GHz, while at room temperature the speed drops at “only” 350 GHz, which is 250 times faster than cell phone processors.
Meyerson compared the achievement to the development of the chips used in Wi-Fi networks. The technology became available to a wide mass of users only when silicon semiconductors were used to produce those wireless networks.
Dan Olds, a principal at the Gabriel Consulting Group, a technology consulting firm in Portland, Oregon, said the development was significant because it showed that the chip industry had not yet reached its upper limits. "There's been talk that we've started to hit the physical limitations of chip performance," he said. "The news here is that we're not coming anywhere near the end in what processors are capable of."
John Cressler, a professor in Georgia Tech's School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, said the work "redefines the upper bounds of what is possible."
