Intel to unveil technologies to deliver 'coolest' chips yet
Intel says it has developed two new ways of building miniscule chips that can operate without overheating.
The designs, to be showcased at a conference in Washington, promise to spur the emergence of truly powerful and reliable mobile computers.
Both involve the use of miniscule transistors that can be switched on and off billions of times a second without overheating.
This year has seen the first chips no more than 20 nanometres wide. One nanometre is about 10,000 times narrower than a human hair.
But size advantage has been let down by poor efficiency - smaller chips need far more heat-generating power to function than conventional ones.
Intel's director of components research Gerald Marcyk says: "If we continue along that trend, we're looking at ridiculous power levels - like a nuclear reactor or a rocket nozzle. We want to avoid that."
The company's first solution to this problem involves building transistors into a thin layer of silicon on top of an embedded layer of insulator. Mr Marcyk says this can mean 100 times less leakage than current solutions.
The other design uses a new material - called high k gate dieletric - that reduces leakage by a factor of 10,000.
Mr Marcyk hopes the technologies will ultimately deliver "10 times the speed and no power increase".
The technologies should be ready to be incorporated into Intel production lines by 2005.
