World renowned tech titan IBM has already touted the advantages of its new flash-beating Racetrack data storage technology this week, and now it has banded together with various high-profile development partners to beat its corporate chest about a new breakthrough material known as “high-k/metal gate” or HKMG.
IBM and partners laud new high-k/metal gate material for improved performance on 32nm circuitry. Credit: IBM.
By utilising its new material on 32nm technology evaluation circuits, IBM and its partners claim to have demonstrated “significant performance and power consumption advantages over industry standards.”
These enhancements include a 35 percent performance boost when compared to 45nm circuits operating at the same voltage, while power reduction on the 32nm test circuits returned a power consumption boost of between 30 to 50 percent (depending on operational voltage) compared to 45nm circuits.
“These early high-k/metal gate results demonstrate that by working together we can deliver leading-edge technologies that handily surpass others in the industry,” commented Gary Patton, VP for IBM’s Semiconductor Research and Development Center. “Demonstrating this caliber of result in a practical environment means that as our collective client base moves to next-generation technology by using the ‘gate-first’ approach, they will continue to maintain a significant competitive advantage.”
According to IBM, silicon support for low-power 32nm HKMG technology will be available via a quarterly prototype program set to begin in the third quarter of 2008. And, feasibility tests carried out on HKMG devices built at the College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering’s Albany NanoTech Complex have revealed that the new material process is viable for a generation extension to 22nm technology.
“This early design and modelling work indicates that the high-k/metal gate technology is going to deliver a significant product and performance differentiation,” enthused Dirk Wrister, director of Process Technology at Freescale. “These early results are a significant step in the demonstration of high-k/metal gate viability in 32nm technology.”
IBM’s development partners include Chartered Semiconductor Manufacturing Ltd, Freescale Inc., Infineon Technologies AG, Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd, STMicroelectronics N.V. and Toshiba Corporation.
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