Intel plans to announce its researchers have come up with a novel method for housing microprocessors that it hopes will speed development of high-performance microchips with more than a billion transistors.
The method addresses a major challenge in what is known as packaging, the materials around the central silicon chip that are crucial to providing power, removing heat and connecting the processor to other components of an electronic device.
Today's processors are mounted on packaging that consists of three layers. In a standard silicon processor like Intel's Pentium chip, droplets of solder carry electrical current from the chip to the package. The grid of droplets, called bumps, connects to a network of tiny copper wires in the top layer of the package; the wires are routed to copper links that drop vertically through a plastic middle layer, or core.
On the other side of the package core, the copper connections are networked through a third packaging layer to much larger pins. These pins, which stick out from the packaging, connect to the circuitry on a motherboard, which links the processor to other components.
News source & rest of the technical info.: Yahoo!
