Intel prepares for next 20 years of chip making

IDG News Service - Intel Corp. pulled back the curtain Friday on some of its future research projects to continue making transistors smaller, faster and less power-hungry out as far as 2020.
In a briefing for reporters and analysts at the company's Santa Clara, Calif., headquarters, Intel researchers discussed exotic materials such as carbon nanotubes and nanowires as well as novel techniques to take the transistor down to the atomic level.
The performance and cost benefits from ever-shrinking transistors have driven Intel and the rest of the IT industry for the past 30 years, but advanced researchers are starting to plan for the day when transistor features simply cannot be made any smaller using conventional materials and techniques.
Once researchers get down to the atomic level, where transistor gates are no wider than an individual atom or two, current manufacturing techniques and materials simply won't work, said Paolo Gargini, an Intel fellow and director of technology strategy at the company.
Intel just completed the transition to its 90-nanometer process technology. The company has plans in place for materials that will enable it to get down to transistors with gate lengths of just 10nm around 2011. But by 2013, Intel and the rest of the chip industry will need new materials to stay on a two-year cycle of shrinking transistors. A nanometer is a billionth of a meter.
Carbon nanotubes and nanowires are two promising materials that many companies are eyeing, said Ken David, director of components research at Intel. Carbon nanotubes are cylinders made from rings of carbon atoms that would be used as the channel between where the power enters and flows out of a transistor. Transistors work when electrical current is either blocked or allowed to flow through the channel, giving the transistor an "on" or "off" state that represents a bit of information.
Nanotubes are durable structures that allow electrons to move more quickly through the channel than current materials, David said. Intel recently built a carbon nanotube transistor that can theoretically run three times faster than a conventional transistor of the same size and power consumption, he said.
While many companies and universities have grown nanotubes, the challenge will be integrating them into a high-volume manufacturing process, David said. The same is true for silicon nanowires, which Intel hopes to one day use to build an entirely new transistor shape, he said.

The metal gate on a current transistor sits above the channel and silicon material. In about four years, Intel plans to integrate tri-gate transistors into its process technologies,