IBM and Intel working on faster chips

SAN FRANCISCO, California (Reuters) -- Intel Corp. and International Business Machines Corp. announced separately Monday new semiconductor technologies and manufacturing processes that could produce chips 10 times faster than those now available.

Armonk, New York-based IBM said the new technology, named CMOS 9S, unites -- for the first time -- IBM innovations in copper wiring, silicon-on-insulator transistors and improved, "low-k dielectric" insulation to build chip circuits as small as 0.13 microns, or nearly 800 times thinner than a human hair.

A variety of chips are already in pilot production using IBM's new manufacturing technique, with first customer shipments planned for early 2001, the company said.

"Our new chip-making recipe integrates more complex, high-performance ingredients onto a chip than ever before," Bijan Davari, vice president of technology and emerging products for IBM, said in a statement.

The new manufacturing technique will be used to produce future generations of the IBM Power4 processor, which will ship in a new IBM eServer next year, the company said.

Santa Clara, California-based Intel said its technology will enable the creation of $1,500 computers that operate at 10 billion cycles a second (10 gigahertz), power that is comparable to mainframe machines that cost millions of dollars.

Intel also discussed at the International Electronic Design Manufacturers show in San Francisco a prototype of a transistor that is just 0.03 microns wide, compared with 0.13 for most transistors today. That could enable chips that have 400 million transistors and run at speeds as fast as 10 gigahertz.

Today's Pentium 4 processors, by contrast, contain 42 million transistors and run at 1.5 gigahertz. Intel said that the new technology is expected to start appearing in its products in 2005.

"This demonstrates there's no fundamental barrier to scaling Moore's Law until the middle of the decade," said Rob Willoner, a market analyst in Intel's technology and manufacturing group.

Moore's Law, formulated by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore decades ago, stipulates that the number of transistors on a chip doubles every 18 months. More transistors in a microprocessor mean power and performance.

Copyright 2000 Reuters. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

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