The Need For Speed

Forget what you know about microchips; new research threatens to turn Moore's Law on its ear.

The first big development you're likely to see will be Matrix Semiconductor's Matrix 3-D Memory chip, an innovative design that stacks layers of etched silicon vertically, keeping the surface area of the chip small while maximizing capacity.

The result: big chips at a fraction of the cost. Tom Lee, Matrix cofounder, figures his company's chips will cost one-tenth the price of flash memory. It's like real estate, he says: "In Tokyo, they build skyscrapers because a square foot is expensive." Thomson/RCA has announced a commercial version—a 64MB write-once CompactFlash-size card due by Christmas.

Such innovation is required to advance semiconductor technology because the dies used to fabricate chips can't be shrunk much further. The logic gates on today's transistors are 70 nanometers wide, explains Gerald Marcyk, director of components research at Intel. To keep pace with Moore's Law (which holds that the number of transistors per square inch on an integrated circuit doubles approximately every 18 months), gates would be 15nm wide by 2009. (The wavelength of an electron is only 10nm.)

The trouble with shrinking dies is more than figuring out how to manufacture them. Even today, chips run less efficiently due to leakage current—stray current that escapes through a chip's insulation—which can cause massive heat problems. And the situation gets worse as the chip gets smaller. To combat this, Intel is exploring a new technology called ovonics to build chips at the atomic level, using a type of glass fiber called chalcogenide. Intel expects this to complement traditional silicon in flash memory by 2005. Intel is also researching other polymer materials that can be stacked like Matrix's (silicon-based) product, allowing larger CPU designs in a small space.

In the more immediate future, Intel will shrink process technology from 13 microns to 9 microns by the end of 2003. While Marcyk is coy about the ultimate speed of these chips—allowing only that they'll be at least double today's 2GHz-plus—the company has built prototypes running at a cool 10GHz.

Copyright © 2002 Ziff Davis Media Inc. All Rights Reserved. Originally appearing in Ziff Davis Smart Business.