45nm Mistry

Okay, so this post is a day after the news, but that’s still better than posting beforehand to create the appearance of a scoop. Yesterday, Intel’s much anticipated presentation of their 45nm process was held at IEDM in Washington. Although I suggested last week that Intel would reveal certain details of their process, much of it still remains a mystery to the wider public. Of course, the devices are openly available allowing one to actually see what’s inside. The IEDM paper gives many details about staying on the curve (Moore’s Law, that is) and the transistor performance the 45nm HKMG process achieves. But it’s more than a little short on details of how that performance is enabled. Anyone fortunate enough to analyze one of the Penryn chips could even conclude that Intel was hoping to throw us all off the scent. (I apologize too since my Perler bead model in the photo is also a bit misleading.)

Intel describes the transistor formation as “high-k first and metal gate last.” If last means after sacrificial poly, then that description is not entirely accurate.

But IEDM offers more than the Intel 45nm show. This was even evident even to Popular Mechanics’ blogger who noted that Intel 45nm would be “duelling” with the AMD, IBM, Freescale, Sony and Toshiba announcement about 32nm. I appreciate, though, the fact that neither the “duel” or Intel’s 45nm presentation itself obscured some more futuristic technology for at least this one reporter in DC. Check Popular Mechanics for some pictures and description of Stanford and Bosch spiral sensor arrays and the University of Tokyo “communications sheet” that allows devices placed on it to communicate with one another while receiving power for charging (also on TR today.

As an IEDM outsider this year, I picked the energy harvesting devices session (14) as a must see. Running parallel to the CMOS technology platform session, I’m sure that it was largely overshadowed by the big boys. But many of these concepts will benefit humankind in a variety of ways and arguably more than CMOS IC technology. As most will guess, the harvesting session includes photovoltaics or solar cell technology, one of the hottest and most newsworthy topics of the last year in the semiconductor industry.

Everybody knows about oil crises, global warming and the Kyoto protocol, so alternate energy is really a topic for the mainstream news channels. But micro- and nano-power generation is where it’s at. Or I guess I should say where it will be at. Check some earlier posts to SemiSerious to track down some information in this exciting field. I really think this will be field that enables many amazing devices from multipurpose nanobots in your bloodstream to wide area sensor nets keeping tabs on the population for the large sibling.

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