Silicon technology failing against laws of physics

Silicon technology is fast reaching the limits of atomic engineering and the industry is going to need a revolution in design in the coming years delegates at SEMICON West 2010 have been told.

Speaking at his keynote address Bernard Meyerson, IBM's vice president of innovation, said that silicon was now being engineered at such a small level that a whole new way of building chips was needed.

For example, he said that scientists had already been able to build 2.6nm carbon nanotubes that functioned as a transistor. However, there was no way to manufacture these in the kind of bulk needed to be useful to the wider industry.

“Silicon doesn't scale to these dimensions,” he said.

“There's a challenge. The industry is up to it but at what cost, that's the question.”

The problems that the industry faced are too big and too expensive for any one company to handle he said. In the 1950s the average return on a dollar of R &D spending was in the region of US$50 for the industry, but as chips have become more complex this has now fallen to US$6 in sales per dollar.

As a result companies had a choice, they could either collaborate or consolidate. There would be a lot of mergers in the years ahead he said, but IBM was working on collaborative efforts between companies.

FinFET gating technology was an example of how this would work he said. AMD, IBM, and Motorola collaborated with academics to develop the double-gate transistor technology in a way that would have been too big a financial risk for just one player.

Other areas that needed addressing was chip proximity he continued. As optical networking grows costs need to come down but also chips have to be physically integrated to reduce latency.

“I never thought I'd say this but the speed of light is woefully slow,” he told delegates.

Another challenge is in data analysis he said. Previously an analyst took a chunk of data and analysed it but this approach was outdated. Instead information was now being analysed in real-time and it was the companies that could build these kind of systems that would see the strongest growth in the future.