Intel announces breakthrough in chip tansistor design

INTEL ANNOUNCES BREAKTHROUGH IN CHIP
TRANSISTOR DESIGN



New type of transistor and new materials combine to address critical power

issues and help chips run cooler



Nov. 26, 2001 -- Intel Corporation today announced that its researchers have

developed an innovative transistor structure and new materials that

represent a dramatic improvement in transistor speed, power efficiency and

heat reduction. The technology development is an important milestone in the

effort to maintain the pace of Moore's Law and remove the technical barriers

that Intel and the semiconductor industry have only recently begun to

identify.

The technology breakthrough, coupled with recent announcements from

Intel on faster and smaller transistors, will enable powerful new

applications such as real-time voice and face recognition, computing without

keyboards, and smaller computing devices with higher performance and

improved battery life.

"Our research has shown that we can continue to make smaller and

faster transistors, but there are fundamental problems we need to address

around power consumption, heat generation, and current leakage," said
Gerald

Marcyk, director of components research, Intel Labs. "Our goal is to

overcome these barriers and produce chips that have 25 times the number of

transistors of today's microprocessors at ten times the speed with no

increase in power consumption."

Intel researchers will discuss two major elements of the new

transistor structure at the International Electron Device Meeting (IEDM) in

Washington D.C. on Dec. 3. Intel's technical papers will address power

consumption, current leakage, and heat issues with two significant

improvements to existing transistor design: a new type of transistor called

a "depleted substrate transistor" and a new material called a
"high k gate

dielectric." Together, these advancements dramatically reduce current

leakage and power consumption.



Power consumption as a limiting factor



As semiconductors become more complex and new milestones in transistor size

and performance are achieved, power consumption and heat have recently

emerged as limiting factors to the continued pace of chip design and

manufacturing. Applying existing designs to future processors becomes

unworkable because of current leakage in the transistor structure, which in

turn requires more power and generates more heat. Transistors are the

microscopic, silicon-based switches that process the ones and zeros of the

digital world.

Intel has already developed the world's smallest and fastest CMOS

transistors, including a 15 nanometer transistor, which will enable chips

with up to one billion transistors by the second half of this decade.

However, as hundreds of millions, and even billions of smaller and faster

transistors get packed on to a single piece of silicon the size of a

thumbnail, power consumption and the amount of heat generated in the

processor core becomes a significant technical challenge. Using existing

methods of semiconductor design would eventually lead to chips that are

simply too hot for desktop computers and servers. These limitations could

even prevent new chip designs from being implemented in smaller computers

like mobile PC's and handheld devices.

"Smaller and faster just isn't good enough anymore," Marcyk said.
"Power and

heat are the biggest issues for this decade. What we are doing with our new

transistor structure is helping  make devices that are extremely power

efficient, concentrating electrical current where it's needed."

The new structure is being called the Intel TeraHertz transistor because the

transistors will be able to switch on and off more than one trillion times

per second. In comparison, it would take a person more than 15,000 years to

turn a light switch on and off a trillion times.



Depleted substrate transistor



One element of the new structure is a "depleted substrate

transistor," which is a new type of CMOS device where the transistor is

built in an ultra-thin layer of silicon on top of an embedded layer of

insulation. This ultra-thin silicon layer, which is different than

conventional silicon-on-insulator devices, is fully depleted to create

maximum drive current when the transistor is turned on, enabling the

transistor to switch on and off faster.

In contrast, when the transistor is turned off, unwanted current leakage is

reduced to a minimum level by the thin insulating layer. This allows the

depleted substrate transistor to have 100 times less leakage than

traditional silicon-on-insulator schemes. Another innovation of Intel's

depleted substrate transistor is the incorporation of low resistance

contacts on top of the silicon layer. The transistor can therefore be very

small, very fast and consume less power. 



New material replaces silicon dioxide



Another key element is the development of a new material that replaces

silicon dioxide on the wafer. All transistors have a
"gate-dielectric," a

material that separates a transistor's "gate" from its active region
(the

gate controls the on-off state of the transistor). The record-setting

transistors introduced in the past year had gate dielectrics made of silicon

dioxide that are only 0.8 nanometers, or approximately three atomic layers

thick. However, the leakage through this atomically thin insulator layer is

becoming one of the largest sources of power consumption of chips.

At the IEDM conference, Intel researchers will demonstrate record speed for

transistors made with a new type of material called a "high k gate

dielectric." This new material reduces gate leakage by more than 10,000

times compared to silicon dioxide. The high k gate material is grown by a

revolutionary technology called "atomic layer deposition" in which the
new

material can be grown in layers only one molecule thick at a time. The

result is higher performance, reduction of heat, and significantly longer

battery life for mobile applications.

The Intel TeraHertz transistor solves a key barrier to bringing future chips

into volume production that enable a whole new range of applications. Intel

is expected to begin incorporating elements of this new structure into its

product line as early as 2005.



For more information on the TeraHertz transistor and other silicon research

at Intel, visit Intel's Silicon Showcase at www.intel.com/research/silicon

<http://www.intel.com/research/silicon>.



Intel, the world's largest chip maker, is also a leading manufacturer of
computer,

networking and communications products. Additional information about Intel

is available at

www.intel.com/pressroom <http://www.intel.com/pressroom>.