At the leading edge of process technology, at which incredibly dense ICs, such as PC processors, mobile phone SOCs (systems on chips), and graphics processors are fabricated, delivering on Moore’s Law is always a stout challenge. The creator of the law, Gordon Moore, intended his comments in 1965 as a challenge to the Intel troops, rather than as a prediction, and the engineers on Intel’s 45-nm-process team are still answering that challenge.
The challenges to maintaining the Moore’s Law pace are many, but the miniaturization effort had pushed one critical part of the transistor to its limits: the piece of silicon dioxide that acts as an insulation layer between the gate and the channel where current flows. With each new generation of Intel chips, this layer had become increasingly thinner—now just five atoms thick at 65 nm—and it became harder to skim off one more atom.
Intel’s team embraced a radical change to the composition of the transistor. For the first time in 40 years, the insulation layer would be made not of silicon dioxide, but of hafnium-oxide, a metal that helps reduce current leakage by a factor of 10.
The change brought other problems. For example, the new material is incompatible with the transistor gate. To address that problem, this team developed yet another new metal material for the gate. Although Intel has yet to publicly reveal details about this breakthrough, Moore himself calls it the “most important change in transistor technology since the late 1960s,” according to Intel. In November, the company introduced a generation of 45-nm chips using these new materials. Because the 45-nm transistors are smaller than the previous generation, they require as much as 30% less energy for switching on and off, offering both power savings and a boost in performance. Industry experts generally consider the resulting Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9650 quad-core processor the fastest PC processor on the market. |
