Intel Invention Means Smaller, Speedier Chips
Chip-making giant Intel Corp. has made a research breakthrough that makes a key component even smaller and faster than one the company unveiled just six months ago.
The new transistor, the tiny part in a chip that switches on and off to regulate the flow of electricity, is just 20 billionths of a meter thick, spokesman Howard High said Sunday. The device is 33% smaller and 25% faster than those that Intel announced in December, he said.
The latest achievement makes it possible to create chips containing 1 billion transistors. Intel’s first Pentium, in 1993, had 3.1 million; today’s Pentium 4 has 42 million, still 476 times fewer than the hypothetical chip using the new transistor. The breakthrough, to be applied to commercial production beginning in 2007, will enable products such as improved speech-recognition and language-translation programs, High said.
Intel will need to perfect another technology, called extreme ultraviolet lithography, a method of printing chip patterns that draws smaller lines than today’s procedures, to make possible mass production of the transistors, he said.
Researchers are striving for smaller microprocessors because the smaller the course electrons must follow, the faster the chip. Faster chips also are typically hotter, so design improvements are needed each time the chip size is reduced.
Faster chips are a bonus as the Internet grows and vast amounts of data are transmitted. Still, speed is only one element of overall chip performance. Server computers that distribute files on networks and serve up Web pages increasingly need chips that not only operate quickly to process calculations and data but also have high bandwidth, the capacity to move large amounts of information.
IBM Corp.’s Power4 chip, for example, will place two microprocessors on a single silicon chip that will hold about 170 million transistors, three to four times the number on competing devices.
IBM said Friday that it had found a way to alter the array of silicon atoms on a chip to boost chip speed by as much as 35%.
Intel, based in Santa Clara, Calif., made a presentation about its research at a conference in Japan. The achievement was reported earlier by the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times.
Intel said Thursday that sales this quarter will be “slightly below the midpoint” of the $6.2-billion-to-$6.8-billion range the company predicted. Investors felt reassured, having expected a bigger cut in the forecast, after computer makers retreated from recent estimates.
Shares of Intel fell 47 cents to close at $30.67 Friday on Nasdaq.
