Intel’s 40th Anniversary
We’ve only just began to experience the power of the 45 nm CPUs and now, Intel plans to shrink the manufacturing process under 10 nanometers. Intel expects that, when the semiconductor industry transitions to 450mm silicon wafers around 2012, the number of companies that run their own fabs will drop into the single digits. These announcements were made by Intel's Pat Gelsinger in a San Francisco preview of celebrations surrounding the chip giant's 40th anniversary this month.
How much longer is Intel going to shrink and miniaturize things? I guess nobody can answer this in exact terms, but speaking of Moore’s Law, Gelsinger noted that there was a time when he and his Intel colleagues wondered if they'd ever be able to scale chips below 100 nanometers.
According to Crn.com, Gelsinger described the elemental hoops Intel has had to jump through to achieve each "tick" milestone in the chip maker's relentless pursuit of Moore's Law, pointing out that while each new process adds materials used in novel ways, modern processors are still built on “the ancient silicon scaffolding."
"We are putting more and more of the periodic table onto that silicon scaffolding. Today we use about half of the elements on the periodic table. When Robert Noyce and Moore started, they used six elements," Gelsinger said.
"We replaced the gate with high-K, we put metal on top of it, but it's still, quote, silicon. [The process of getting smaller] keeps moving forward. It may be carbon nanotubes next or it may be spintronics. But we'll keep moving forward."
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