The chip race
IBM's achievement will further charge the increasingly competitive atmosphere in the semiconductor universe as companies race to find a creative solution to the industry's looming problems.
For years, semiconductor manufacturers improved the performance of their products by doubling the number of transistors on their chips every two years, in keeping with Moore's Law. More and smaller transistors lead to higher clock speeds and greater integration of functions into silicon.
This process, though, has had unsavoury and unintended consequences. The heat produced by microprocessors, which now can contain over 200 million transistors, is becoming extremely difficult to dissipate.
Meanwhile, the cost of designing and manufacturing chips with this vast number of microelements has grown astronomically. Except for Intel, most companies will join forces to build and operate factories, and even pool design efforts, because of the financial risks involved.
In this race, IBM and Intel are bitter rivals. For its part, IBM can claim a number of firsts. It was the first to produce chips with copper, rather than aluminium, wires. The company also developed silicon-on-insulator, a technology for improving performance and reducing heat, that has been licensed to Advanced Micro Devices, among others.
IBM has also been at the forefront of strained silicon and carbon nanotubes, other technologies that will one day likely be used to make chips.
Intel, though, can boast of research breakthroughs of its own, as well as far higher sales volumes. Despite the downturn in the PC industry, Intel remains the largest semiconductor manufacturer in the world.
The two companies aren't alone in the race. Hewlett-Packard has actively pursued research in molecular computing, creating circuits out of chains of atoms.
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