2008 R&D 100 Winner
Transistors, the basic components of today’s computer chips, have a fundamental flaw: they leak. No matter how carefully the chip is made, electrons—like helium from a balloon—find their way out, hurting current flow and producing heat. The next-generation 45 nm process standard offers a lot of potentially leaky transistors—more than 400 million for a single dual-core chip.
Gates control the opening and closing of these transistors, which are insulated from the gate by a dielectric. Intel Corp., Santa Clara, Calif., saw an opportunity to reduce this transistor leakage and developed the Intel 45 nm High-k Metal Gate Transistor Technology for its new 45 nm process chips. Silicon dioxide, the industry standard gate dielectric for MOSFET transistors for 40 years, had been reduced to 1.2 nm thick, but at the 65 nm node current leakage and heat markedly increased. Intel replaced this with a thicker hafnium-based material that has a high dielectric constant, k, in the gate dielectric. This step reduces leakage by more than 10 times. Because the high-k dielectric is incompatible with silicon gate electrodes, a new proprietary blend of metals replaces the gate itself.
The new combination improves drive current by 20%, reduces active switching power by 30%, and reduces source-drain leakage by more than five times. As a result, Intel chips enjoy the sort of performance gains that come with having nearly twice as many transistors in the same footprint as the current 65 nm generation chips. Targeted for production this fall, the lead-free high-k metal gate transistors will soon find their way into Intel’s multi-core processor product line.
Technology
Transistor technology for Intel's 45-nm process chips
Developer
Intel Corp.
