Super-thin semiconductors delay the ‘death’ of silicon

Silicon has been the backbone of processors for decades, but it's rapidly approaching its physical limits: making a chip on a process smaller than 5 nanometers is usually impossible without introducing problems. How is Moore's Law for chip complexity...

IBM squeezes 30 billion transistors into a fingernail-sized chip

Who said Moore's Law was dead? Certainly not IBM or its chip partners Globalfoundries and Samsung. The trio has developed a transistor manufacturing process that should pave the way for 5-nanometer chips. While the team etched the chip using the same...

IBM squeezes 30 billion transistors into a fingernail-sized chip

Who said Moore's Law was dead? Certainly not IBM or its chip partners Globalfoundries and Samsung. The trio has developed a transistor manufacturing process that should pave the way for 5-nanometer chips. While the team etched the chip using the same...

Intel: Our next chips will be a ‘generation ahead’ of Samsung

Intel says that when its long-delayed 10-nanometer Cannon Lake chips finally arrive, they'll be a "full generation ahead" of rivals Samsung and TMSC, thanks to "hyper scaling" that squeezes in twice as many transistors. That will yield CPUs with 25 p...

Intel is officially slowing down the pace of CPU releases

To make consumers crave its next generation of CPUs, Intel has produced chips on a yearly tick-tock cycle for the last decade. Thanks to the shrinking die sizes, that process may permanently become a three-step, according to financial documents spott...

TSMC narrows production of 16nm FinFET chips to late 2013, wants 10nm in 2015

FinFET chip

For as often as TSMC has extolled the virtues of FinFET chip designs, we've been wondering exactly when we'd find them sitting in our devices. Thanks to competition from rival semiconductor firms, we'll get them relatively soon: the company now expects to produce its first wave of FinFET-based, 16-nanometer chips toward the end of 2013. While they won't be as nice as 14nm-XM chips in the pipeline, the 16nm parts should still offer battery life and speed improvements over the 28nm chips we know today. These improvements also won't be the end of the road -- TSMC anticipates 10nm designs built on extreme ultraviolet lithography late into 2015, and CEO Morris Chang believes there's seven or more years of advancements in manufacturing before Moore's Law starts breaking down. We'll just be happy if we see FinFET reach our phones and tablets in the near term.

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Via: Phone Arena

Source: EETimes

MIT researchers concoct smallest indium gallium arsenide transistor ever made

MIT researchers concoct smallest indium gallium arsenide transistor ever made

Researchers at MIT's Microsystems Technology Laboratories may be giving Moore's Law a new lease on life with the development of the smallest indium gallium arsenide transistor ever made, measuring up at 22-nanometers. Such transistors could produce more current when shrunken down than those based on silicon, which means chips may continue to pack in more transistors while providing a bigger punch. "We have shown that you can make extremely small indium gallium arsenide MOSFETs (metal-oxide semiconductor field-effect transistors) with excellent logic characteristics, which promises to take Moore's Law beyond the reach of silicon," says co-developer of the tech Jesús del Alamo. The development is an encouraging step in the right direction, but the MIT team still has a long road ahead of it before the tech shows up in your gadgets. Next on the docket for the scientists is improving the transistor's electrical performance and downsizing it to below 10-nanometers. For the nitty gritty on how the transistor was built, hit the adjacent source link.

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Source: MIT News