International Business Machines Corp, whose research budget totaled US$5.2 billion last year, says it has perfected a technique for making faster transistors, opening the door to advanced microprocessors.
The advance, to be reported this week at a conference in Washington, will make long-sought "double-gate" transistors economical in chip manufacturing within five years, said Bijan Davari, IBM's vice president of semiconductor development. As a result, chip performance will probably improve by between 30 percent and 100 percent, Davari said.
Double-gate transistors help speed and control electrical flow across tiny gaps that create on-off switches so microprocessors can compute.
While advances in materials and chip design continue to produce semiconductors that are faster and use less power than their predecessors, finding economical ways to manufacture the new designs has often been a stumbling block. IBM typically incorporates microchip advances into its own server computers, then sells the chips to rivals.
"They're one of the few folks that do basic research and then take it into production -- the competitive benefit is immense," said Fred Zieber, a chip analyst with Pathfinder Research Inc.
Today's chips can hold millions of transistors, each an on-off switch using a single gate to control electron flow. As transistors have shrunk, scientists have found that electron leakage often allowed the transistor to stick in the "on" position.
Adding a second gate to better control the flow lets the transistor work properly, without leakage, at higher speeds. Among the key challenges has been finding ways to precisely align two gates opposite one another.
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