“It is what both wide-eyed engineers and anxious executives have described as the ‘Holy Grail of semiconductor technology,’ and Friday morning Intel revealed it has developed working 45-nm processor samples running Microsoft Windows Vista, Mac OS X, Linux and other operating systems, where this material – a compound based on the element hafnium, atomic number 72, a frequently occurring impurity in zirconium typically found in fake diamonds – serves as the dielectric gate between the current source and the current drain. With the hafnium material serving as the gate, Intel will then replace the polysilicon electrode layer with a metal electrode, the exact alloy used here also being kept secret. As a result, transistors for 45 nm semiconductors starting with Intel’s Penryn family will be fabricated at half the size of those used in today’s 65 nm Core 2 processors. At the same time, transistor switching power can be reduced by as much as 30%, while still obtaining a performance improvement of as much as 20%. And current leakage at the gate will be reduced by a factor of 10.”
Intel Re-Invents the Transistor
Wow! I know this is a highly geeky article, but read it over and try to understand the implications! Smaller, faster, more efficient chips! Very cool tech coming down the pipeline… this is cool stuff!
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