IBM, Intel chip in to prove Moore's Law

By Anand Parthasarathy

KOCHI, JUNE 12. Thirty five years ago, Intel co-founder and microprocessor pioneer, Dr. Gordon Moore, first noted a technology trend that came to be known as ``Moore's Law'' - the fact that the number of transistors on a microchip will double every 18 months or so.

It is a law that has held good right from the first computer chip - the Intel 4004 with 2,300 transistors - right up to the latest Pentium 4 processor that fits 42 million transistors on a stamp- sized sliver of silicon.

But there have been recent fears that the limits of both physics and fabrication have been almost reached.

No fear - Moore's Law lives - for another 7 years at least. That is the message from both Intel and IBM this week as they showcase their latest research breakthroughs at an ongoing international microprocessor conference in Kyoto, Japan.

On Wednesday, IBM researchers are due to present two papers announcing a novel way to kick up the speed at which electrons jump through transistors. The process is called ``strained silicon'' and has been achieved by growing the silicon layer on top of another semiconductor - germanium. The result is that the latter's larger lattice structure ``tugs'' at the silicon atoms and increases the gap between them. This allows the electrons to flow through the gap at least 70 per cent faster than at present. The net effect is to boost performance of the chip by about 35 per cent.

At these zippy speeds, tomorrow's chips can handle data flows at 200 gigahertz - almost 200 times faster than today's processors. The icing on the silicon cake is that all this has been achieved using today's conventional CMOS - complementary metal oxide semiconductor - technology, which is good news for chip makers worldwide.

Tiniest transistor

Over the weekend at the same venue, Intel scientists announced that it had succeeded in fabricating the world's tiniest transistor - only 70 to 80 atoms or 20 nanometres wide and 3 atoms thick. A nanometre is 10,000 times narrower than a human hair.

This makes possible computer chips that could house as many as 1 billion of these transistors - 23 times more than today's best Pentium chip. Intel thinks these chips could be clocking at 20 gigahertz (the fastest Pentium currently clocks 1.7 GHz) and could be in commercial production by 2007.

Such hypersmall devices will make possible a new era of computing, mainly through spoken commands.

Meanwhile, the man who foresaw all this - Dr. Moore - retired as Chairman Emeritus at Intel on May 31, with the parting thought that ``education will become our Achilles heel'' unless IT training is imparted more systematically. One of his last engagements was to preside over the Intel Science Fair at the company's California headquarters, where students from all over the world displayed their scientific acumen. One winner who explained his energy conservation project to Dr. Moore was the Indian school boy, Yash Vasanth.

(Left) An enlarged view of the IBM chip showing the ``strained silicon'' channel.

(Right) Dr. Gordon Moore with the Indian schoolboy, Yash Vasanth, at the Intel Science Fair.

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