Unveiling 45nm processors, Intel bounces way ahead

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Intel, the world’s largest chip maker, have altered the recipe of their computer- chips, modernizing the basic ingredients, and giving way to a new generation of faster and more energy proficient processors.

The Silicon Valley company announced that it will replace the materials used for decades in its production, and will start churning out new chips in the second half of this year.

Company researchers said that the altered recipe would give a new taste to the users, fetching big gains for the company and boosting the capabilities of personal computers in terms of faster speed and low power consumption.

The microprocessor chips are not only devised for computers, but the energy efficient chips will also prove beneficial for other consumer devices as well. Playing a full-length video on cell phones is a mammoth digital task, but with the new chips, users can do this without exhausting their batteries.

The company boasted the ‘Penryn’ chips as the greatest step forward for the company and claims that the chip will put Intel a year ahead of the competition.

The layer of silicon dioxide covering the gate in a transistor in a 65nm chip is about five atoms thick, or about 1.2nm, and it was firmly believed that minimizing it any further will not be possible.

"When they first described this to me a couple of years ago, I said that this cannot possibly work," Intel chief executive Paul Otellini said at the event.

"But we are doing it with this level of technology, we do not need Silicon on Insulator, we do not need emerging lithography. It is just high performance, high volume, low cost innovation."

The advancement of technology ignited a war and IBM rushed to announce that it is on the verge of making something similar.

Industry analysts said that Intel has already taken a big leap in the computer industry and has marched way ahead of its rivals. However, IBM executives disputed the claim and said the two companies were focused on different markets in the computing industry.

The technology IBM uses is made in partnership with AMD, Intel’s greatest rival. Interconnected fabric of hundreds of millions of tiny switches is the main ingredient for modern microprocessor and memory chips.

The manufacturing technology has seen new rays of light ever since it came into existence, continuously improved with the passage of time.

IBM is planning to use Immersion lithography for its 45 nm chips, a process that uses highly purified water during the lithography process, but Intel believes that the technique will not be ready until 2009 when the chipmaker plans to switch to a 32nm production process.

In order to avoid plunging into expensive technological advancement, production techniques by deploying a combination of high-k dielectric and metal gate techniques will be used by Intel.

Currently, the production technique uses a layer of silicon dioxide, but Intel will replace it with layer of hafnium in its 45nm chips. On top of this layer, researchers are placing a metal gate. The company due to competitive reasons did not reveal the metals used.

"There are hundreds of material options for metal electrodes and high-k dielectics," said Mark Bohr, a senior fellow in Intel's logic technology development team.

"Finding the combination of high-k dielectrics and two different metal materials that work, that meet high performance, low leakage, reliability and manufacturing requirements, is a very significant accomplishment.

"I do not believe that any other company is this far along with high-k gates, nor do I believe that they will have it in a 32nm version or later."

The announcement made by Intel shows that technology adage never goes waste and Moore’s law, which states that the number of transistors on a chip doubles roughly every two years, giving rise to a constant escalation of computing power at lower costs, is still followed.