As you read this, two of our most advanced fabs here at Intel are gearing up for the commercial production of the latest Core 2 microprocessors, code-named Penryn, due to start rolling off the lines before the year is up. The chips, based on our latest 45-nanometer CMOS process technology will have more transistors and run faster and cooler than microprocessors fabricated with the previous, 65-nm process generation. For computeintensive music, video, and gaming applications, users will see a hefty performance increase over the best chips they are now using.
A welcome development but hardly big news, right? After all, the density of transistors on chips has been periodically doubling, as predicted by Moore’s Law, for more than 40 years. The initial Penryn chips will be either dual-core processors with more than 400 million transistors or quad-core processors with more than 800 million transistors. You might think these chips don’t represent anything other than yet another checkpoint in the inexorable march of Moore’s Law.
But you’d be wrong. The chips would not have been possible without a major breakthrough in the way we construct a key component of the infinitesimal transistors on those chips, called
the gate stack. The basic problem we had to overcome was that a few years ago we ran out of atoms. Literally.
To keep on the Moore’s Law curve, we need to halve the size of our transistors every 24 months or so. The physics dictates that the smallest parts of those transistors have to be diminished by a factor of 0.7. But there’s one critical part of the transistor that we found we couldn’t shrink anymore. It’s the thin layer of silicon dioxide (SiO2 ) insulation that electrically isolates the transistor’s gate from the channel through which current flows when the transistor is on. That insulating layer has been slimmed and shrunk with each new generation, about tenfold since the mid-1990s alone. Two generations before Penryn, that insulation had become a scant five atoms thick.
We couldn’t shave off even one more tenth of a nanometer— a single silicon atom is 0.26 nm in diameter. More important, at a thickness of five atoms....[read more]
But you’d be wrong. The chips would not have been possible without a major breakthrough in the way we construct a key component of the infinitesimal transistors on those chips, called
the gate stack. The basic problem we had to overcome was that a few years ago we ran out of atoms. Literally.
To keep on the Moore’s Law curve, we need to halve the size of our transistors every 24 months or so. The physics dictates that the smallest parts of those transistors have to be diminished by a factor of 0.7. But there’s one critical part of the transistor that we found we couldn’t shrink anymore. It’s the thin layer of silicon dioxide (SiO2 ) insulation that electrically isolates the transistor’s gate from the channel through which current flows when the transistor is on. That insulating layer has been slimmed and shrunk with each new generation, about tenfold since the mid-1990s alone. Two generations before Penryn, that insulation had become a scant five atoms thick.
We couldn’t shave off even one more tenth of a nanometer— a single silicon atom is 0.26 nm in diameter. More important, at a thickness of five atoms....[read more]
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