Chip

Intel Corp. has found a way to make smaller, faster microprocessors, a development the company's legendary co-founder Gordon Moore called "the biggest change in transistor technology since ... the late 1960s."

Intel will begin using new materials besides silicon to open and close the transistor gates on its next generation of chips, making them more energy efficient.

In a related development, IBM announced a similar change in its chip-making processes Friday, but its new chips are about a year away from delivery, while Intel's advance is being incorporated into microprocessors rolling out soon.

The announcements come at a time when the technology industry is pulling out all the stops to keep pace with "Moore's Law," the famed prediction by Intel's now-retired co-founder that the number of transistors on a chip will roughly double every two years. Electronics manufacturers are cheering on the chip industry because their gadgets depend on smaller, faster and cheaper semiconductors.

Even with these breakthroughs, silicon still will be used in the bulk of chips made by Intel and other semiconductor makers.

But Intel's new "Penryn" microprocessors, which will start coming out in volume this year, will use two new materials for the first time to open and close the transistors on the chips.

Simply put, all chips are a collection of transistors, tiny gates that can swing open to let electricity flow or swing shut to cut it off.

In the binary language of computers, a closed transistor registers as a zero, while an open transistor is a one. Until now, chips have been made almost entirely of silicon because that material can exist in slightly different forms that allow it to either conduct electricity like the copper inside a wire or stop it from flowing like rubber insulation that is safe to touch.

But as transistors have gotten smaller and smaller -- Intel says 2,000 of these new electronic gates could fit across a hair -- silicon simply hasn't been doing a good enough job as an insulator. So Intel has been working on replacing silicon, and where chip designs call for an insulator level, it has instead used a form of hafnium -- a metal so dense that it is used in nuclear reactor control rods to absorb neutrons.

In addition to making the hafnium substitution, Intel scientists said they had to make one other important change: linking the new insulation layer to a new, metal gate switch. But Intel says this new material is so sensitive that it is keeping the identity of this metal a mystery for now.

The stakes in this continuing race to build faster chips were underscored by the way this information was released. Intel had scheduled briefings in advance but asked reporters to hold the story until Monday. IBM started circulating an announcement that it, too, had found a way to use hafnium instead of silicon in this insulation role. Both companies then speeded up the release of their news.

The rival announcements from Intel and IBM come on the heels of a breakthrough by Hewlett-Packard, which recently announced yet another way to speed up the performance of a different type of chip called a field-programmable gate array. New material plugs chip leaks

Under certain conditions, silicon can either conduct or block electricity, hence the term semiconductor.

Standard Transistor Gate

But as chips have shrunk in size, silicon layers with insulating functions have grown so thin they can leak electricity, draining laptop batteries.

New Transistor Gate

Intel has started using a form of hafnium as an insulating layer. Above this hafnium layer, it has also added a new mystery metal in place of standard silicon. But most of the surface area of the chips will still be based on silicon.

Hafnium-containing compounds are today the leading contenders to become a new breed of semiconductor material called high-k dielectrics for their high dielectric constant. A number of chemical companies are jockeying to become suppliers of these new compounds, knowing full well that they are playing a perilous game because semiconductor makers try to hang on to familiar materials for as long as they can.

High-k materials are being developed for use in the transistor, the guts of the semiconductor. Specifically, they will function as the gate insulator, a thin layer in the transistor that separates the gate, which turns current flow on and off, from the channel through which the current flows.

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