The Hindu Business Line : Intel transits to 40-nano era

The tick-tock advance every alternate year to denser, more complex processor chips almost hit a road block — till a fundamental advance in transistor design helped bypass the obstacle that loomed large when chip makers tried to move from 65 nanometre to 45 nanometre fabrication processes. This was the message Intel gave its community of product partners, on Tuesday at its annual developer forum, which opened in the Chinese capital.

A nanometre — a billionth of a metre — is used as a measure of the gap that separates individual transistors on a chip. In the latest quad core or four-cores-on-a-chip these could number as many as 800 million. At this minuscule distances, current leaks out — and rather than try to stop the leak, Intel has reworked the way transistors are `grown' — claiming the biggest breakthrough in transistor design in over 40 years. It has replaced the polysilicate base with a metal that it is holding as a tight secret; and replaced the silicon dioxide layer that sits on top, with hafnine.

This technology breakthrough will enable Intel to introduce the industry's first 40 nanometre chips, code named Penryn, later this year, said Senior Vice President (Digital Enterprise) Mr Pat Gelsinger, in a press briefing on the sidelines of the developers' event.

For desktop PC chips this could mean a 15 per cent performance improvement over current processors and the gain would be most palpable in consumer applications like gaming which would be 40 per cent more efficient compared to the multi core chips launched only weeks ago, Mr Gelsinger added.

Miss by India

In a case of fortuitous timing, Intel also announced that the newest `fab' where such futuristic chips on 300 millimetre wafers (the size of a large pizza) would be manufactured would be the upcoming semiconductor foundry in Dalian, China — a $2.5 billion investment for the company. For India this is in the nature of a lost opportunity...the US chip maker possibly found the wait for India's semiconductor policy too long for its own roadmap and decided on China as the home for its latest chip-making plant.

The Chief Technology Officer set the theme for the two-day event as a `welcome to the multi core era' — its recent announcement of the 80-core "tera flop" chip, (substantially developed at its India facilities) providing a teaser of things to come.