Re: further newsbit on those new IBM transistors

From: Brian Atkins (brian@posthuman.com)
Date: Tue Jun 26 2001 - 21:29:37 MDT


I asked on an AMD newsgroup and one person guessed 40 to 50ghz switching
speed for .18 processes. So if the truth is somewhere between 40 to 100ghz
I don't see how upping that to 210ghz in IBM's process translates to
them claiming to be able to produce 100ghz clocked chips in 2003. hmm

Dani Eder wrote:
>
> The following quote gives a number of 10 picoseconds
> (=100 GHz). 0.18 microns is the current feature
> size in CPU chips. So the implication is the
> 200 GHz new value is a factor of 2 improvement over
> what we have now.
>
> "IBM was able to cut channel-switching delay using SOI
> and thereby boost chip performance significantly over
> its current copper-based PowerPC chips that use bulk
> technology. Shahidi said a ring oscillator circuit, a
> benchmark widely used in the chip industry to measure
> transistor speed, has delay of less than 10
> picoseconds with a channel length of 0.12 microns
> using a 0.22-micron CMOS process. That's comparable
> with transistor speeds exhibited by Intel's
> 0.18-micron process based on bulk CMOS, which uses
> shorter channel lengths because of its smaller line
> widths, he said."
>
> --- "Eliezer S. Yudkowsky" <sentience@pobox.com>
> wrote:
> > Dani Eder wrote:
> > >
> > > You need to keep clear the distinction between the
> > > transistor switching speed, which may be 100 GHz,
> > > and the chip clock speed, which is the transistor
> > > speed divided by the number of transistors in
> > series
> > > involved in one clock cycle. The very shortest
> > > cycle would be a flip-flop type oscillator, which
> > > would take 2 transistors. More typically it would
> > > take 5-10 transistors in series to complete a
> > logic
> > > operation.
> >
> > What's the actual switching speed of a modern-day
> > transistor in a 1GHz
> > Pentium?
> >
> > -- -- -- --
> > --
> > Eliezer S. Yudkowsky
> > http://intelligence.org/
> > Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for
> > Artificial Intelligence
>
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-- 
Brian Atkins
Director, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
http://www.intelligence.org/


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