Intel's New Chip Transistor Design

As overclockers are well aware, the more electricity you pump through a processor, the hotter it gets. That's the main reason we screw around with things like water coolers, multiple fans, and the like. Keep it cool, and you can run more juice through it. Let it overheat, and you've got a really expensive paperweight on your hands. It stands to reason that improving the materials that make up processors so that they can survive under the increased heat of higher voltages should lead to faster processors in general. It sounds like Intel is working toward that goal with the announcement of a new transistor structure and new materials that the company says could lead to chips that have 25 times the number of transistors of today's microprocessors at ten times the speed with no increase in power consumption.

The new structure is called the Intel TeraHertz transistor because the transistors will be able to switch on and off more than one trillion times per second. One element of the new structure is a "depleted substrate transistor," which is a new type of CMOS device where the transistor is built in a thin layer of silicon on top of an embedded layer of insulation. This silicon layer creates maximum drive current when the transistor is turned on, enabling the transistor to switch on and off faster. When the transistor is turned off, unwanted current leakage is reduced by the insulating layer, which Intel says allows the depleted substrate transistor to have 100 times less leakage than silicon-on-insulator schemes. Another aspect of Intel's depleted substrate transistor is the incorporation of low resistance contacts on top of the silicon layer and the development of a new material that replaces silicon dioxide on the wafer. The new material is called a "high k gate dielectric," and is said to reduce gate leakage by more than 10,000 times compared to silicon dioxide. The high k gate material is grown by a technology called "atomic layer deposition" in which the new material can be grown in layers one molecule thick at a time. Intel says it will begin incorporating elements of this new structure into its product line as early as 2005.