The Next Big Thing in Chipmaking

A new chipmaking approach marks the biggest change in transistor technology since the introduction of polysilicon-gate, metal-oxide-semiconductor. This could overcome the most substantial roadblock to continuing to use current production processes to shrink transistor elements and thereby increase chip performance. AMD, IBM, and Intel have announced plans to replace the silicon dioxide insulator layer of processors with new hafnium-based high-k materials, which increase charge transmission and reduce electrical leakage. To accommodate this, they replace the doped polysilicon used in transistor gates with a combination of metals. This solves a key problem: building transistors smaller horizontally so that manufacturers can pack more of them onto chips while increasing energy efficiency and continuing to use current chipmaking techniques, thereby avoiding expensive fabrication-plant changes. Many real advances are likely to come not from new materials but from the development of better muticore chips - which improve performance by having multiple cores run tasks in parallel rather than by increasing clock speed - as well as from the optimization of applications for these processors