SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Intel Corp. INTC.O has devised a new structure for transistors -- the tiny switches that make up semiconductors -- in a development it said could lead to microprocessors that run at blazing speeds and consume far less power than conventional ones.
The technology, Intel said, solves two of the more intractable problems facing the development and manufacture of microprocessors today as more and more transistors are packed onto each chip: power consumption and heat. In addition, as the geometries on chips become ever smaller, it becomes increasingly difficult to ensure that electrons go where they were engineered to go, a problem that can lead to current leakage within the device.
The advances, which Intel calls the TeraHertz transistor because it cycles on and off 1 trillion times per second, could ultimately lead to new applications, such as real-time voice and face recognition, computing without keyboards and ever-smaller electronic gizmos with higher performance and improved battery life. To compare, it would take a person more than 15,000 years to turn a light switch on and off a trillion times.
"The real significance of this is that they"ve basically invented a new transistor technology that"s fundamentally different and it"s manufacturable," said analyst Dan Hutchinson of market research firm VLSI Research. "They"ve completely re-engineering the transistor as we know it."
This leakage of electrical current within a transistor, which is simply a solid-state switch that toggles between an "on" and an "off" position when current is applied, can quickly become problematic. Leakage can lead to a microprocessor generating data errors, producing so much heat that the silicon actually melts, and consuming too much power.
"The general issue of heat is one that everybody is confronting," said analyst Nathan Brookwood of market research consultant Insight 64.