Design News for Mechanical and Design Engineers

Known as “high-k,” the new technology uses hafnium instead of silicon dioxide as a transistor gate dielectric. Combined with a proprietary metal gate material, the new high-k design promises to reduce current leakage by a factor of more than ten times over silicon dioxide, and reportedly offers a 20-percent increase in drive current. Intel co-founder and industry legend Gordon Moore calls high-k “the biggest change in transistor technology since the introduction of polysilicon gate MOS transistor in the late 1960s.”

Intel says it will employ the new technology on 16 new server and PC processors, all of which were unveiled on November 11. The company announced that hundreds of millions of the high-k transistors will be incorporated in next-generation Intel Core 2 Duo, Intel Core 2 Quad, and Xeon families of multi-core processors.

Industry analysts say that if high-k performs as promised, it could represent a big step forward. “Conventional technology has reached the point where transistors have gotten so small, they leak more current than they consume in an active state,” notes Tom Starnes, a semiconductor market analyst for Objective Analysis, Ltd. “If you can stop the leakage, then you can crank up to a higher speed and still not lose so much when you’re standing still.”

Intel engineers say they solved the transistor leakage problem by replacing silicon dioxide with the thicker hafnium-based high-k material in the gate dielectric (hafnium is a chemical element, atomic number 72). Because the high-k gate dielectric is not compatible with today’s silicon gate electrode, however, Intel also developed new metal gate materials to be used with hafnium. The company has not yet divulged the specific metal alloy used for the gate materials, however.

Intel’s new line of 45-nm processors, which are using high-k, are said to offer twice the transistor density of previous chips. A quad core hafnium-based chip packs 820 million transistors on board, the company says.

Analysts say they expect Intel’s new technology to be adopted in high-performance areas of computing. Depending on whether Intel licenses the technology, it could also see use in high-performance PowerPC processors, MIPS processors, ARM cores and high-end DSPs.

“The question is, how much will Intel share the technology?” Starnes says. “Will use you have to use Intel fabs to get it? Or will they license it out and share their patent portfolio?”

If Intel does license the technology, Starnes expects it to affect the top tier of the market, which could represent as much as a quarter of the processors being manufactured. The entire semiconductor industry, he says, has been searching for a way to continue shrinking electronic circuitry without wasting electric current and dissipating unnecessary heat.

“It’s a relief because there has been this wall that has been hard to punch through for the last couple of years,” Starnes says. “If this helps punch through that wall, then a lot of people will want it.”

Video link: Gordon Moore talks about Intel’s hafnium technology.     

	Intel’s 45-nm hafnium-based “high-k” processors on a wafer: With the new formula, Intel can pack 410 million transistors on a dual core chip and 820 million transistors on a quad core.