Intel to unveil fastest transistorSan Jose 11 June 2001 Intel Corp. has created the world's fastest silicon transistors, tiny switches that turn on and off nearly 1,000 times more quickly than those that power today's microprocessors.
The technology also shrinks the devices to a width of about 80 atoms, Intel's director of components research, Gerald Marcyk, commented. That would make room for about 25 times more transistors than are packed in today's top-of-the-line Pentium 4. The transistors would not be incorporated into processors until 2007, according to Mr. Marcyk. Such powerful processors are expected to play a key role in the growth of speech recognition and language translation applications, as well as programmes that now require a supercomputer to run. Transistors are at the heart of all modern computers. The opening and closing of their switches are the basis of all computations inside a microprocessor. In 1965, Intel co-founder Gordon Moore predicted that the number of transistors on a piece of silicon would double roughly every 18 months. Moore's Law, as the famous prediction is now known, has been amazingly accurate, largely thanks to new technologies that make transistors smaller and faster. Performance has followed a similar path. The first "fully transistorised'' computer, built by IBM in 1954, had 2,000 transistors. Intel's Pentium 4, by comparison, has about 42 million. About 1 billion of the new transistors can be squeezed into a microprocessor with the new technology, Intel said. "A lot of people have speculated about Moore's Law running out of speed. A lot of people have talked about slowing down innovation,'' Mr. Marcyk noted. "The reality is that innovation is probably accelerating if anything else in terms of transistors.'' The super-fast transistors, presented at a silicon nanotechnology workshop in Kyoto, Japan, are just 20 nanometers wide. A nanometer is about 10,000 times narrower than a human hair. One component of the transistor is only three atoms wide. In addition to increasing computing speed, the new transistors also require less power. A Pentium 4 now consumes about 1.7 volts, compared with less than 1 volt for processors built with the new technology. Other chipmakers also are also working to develop smaller, more efficient processors, said Kevin Krewell, a senior analyst at MicroDesign Resources. "This is just one step along the way,'' Mr. Krewell stated. "I'm sure IBM will counter pretty soon with their own fastest transistor in the world.''
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