IBM has developed a manufacturing method for semiconductors that it says can deliver up to a 30 percent boost in computing speed and performance.
Chips made using the new process could help device makers deliver cell phones with better battery life and handheld PCs with more advanced features.
The production method focuses on placing insulation around the wires of a processor to reduce within-the-chip electrical interference that hinders performance and wastes power.
The need to insulate circuits has become increasingly apparent as chip makers, striving to build more powerful processors, pack more and more circuits onto a single piece of silicon. As a result, the millions of tightly packed circuits on a chip generate interference, just as crosstalk can occur on telephone lines.
IBM's manufacturing technique seals the wiring using a "low-k dielectric" plastic material called SiLK. (Low-k dialectrics afford insulation with minimum power loss.) Sev eral companies are vying to produce their own low-k dielectric materials to address processor insulation problems.
"This represents a fundamental paradigm shift" in how processors are made, said Ron Goldblatt, senior manager of the advanced logic technology group at IBM Microelectronics.
While IBM's technique is proprietary, the material, known by the trademarked name SiLK, was developed by the Dow Chemical Co. and is commercially available.
IBM claims that the production method can be readily adapted by chip makers because it uses mainstream "spin-on" semiconductor manufacturing equipment to apply the material and because the material is commercially available.
IBM is producing chips with its process on a pilot production line at its Semiconductor Research and Development Center, and plans to introduce the technology on its high-volume manufacturing lines in the first half of next year.
Consumers will greatly benefit from the technology as it is "applied across all of our microprocessors and [static RAMs]," Goldblatt said.
"If you use this technology in an ASIC [application-specific integrated circuit] design for a cell phone, you're going to get a cell phone that runs longer on the same battery," Goldblatt said.
Another potential benefit could come in the area of voice recognition for handhelds, he said. "That's been prohibitive to date because of power requirements. Well, if you introduce a lower-power-draw chip technol ogy, you may very well see that come of age."
To speed the introduction of products based on this manufacturing process, IBM also announced a custom chip called Cu-11. The ASIC template will be manufactured with IBM's 0.13-micron process technology, resulting in chip features as small as 0.11 micron. Cu-11 will support designs with up to 40 million circuits, according to company officials.
IBM said it will make Cu-11 design kits, including software design tools and services, available in July to help customers build a new generation of customized chips capable of driving high-performance Internet servers, power-saving cellular telephones and advanced network communications gear.
IBM can be reached at (914) 499-1900 or www.ibm.com.
Block that interference!
Problem: interference created by packing millions of circuits onto a chip
Solution: insulate wiring with low-k dielectric plastic material called SiLK
Result: low-power-consumption chips that can be used in all kinds of devices
