posted by Kelin Kuhn on October 30, 2009
I’m writing this on the plane from Narita airport to Portland as I return from giving the plenary talk at the Solid State Devices and Materials conference (SSDM), in Sendai Japan. It is always exciting to visit these device conferences to see the myriad of new options that are being discussed for next generation transistors.
Before I get into the technical details, I have a few fun stories to share about my trip. I arrived a little early, so I could have the weekend to tour Tokyo. Much of my time in Tokyo was spent figuring out the subway/train system. In all the excitement, I managed to lose my wallet on the subway, and to my surprise and delight - it was returned a few hours later (with all the money intact). I was deeply impressed as I doubt that would happen in New York! Another adventure was with a Japanese toilet at Tokyo institute of technology. Japanese toilets are quite complicated (among other things, they play music) with a number of interesting features (which I will not describe here, you’ll need to go to Japan to check). This was one of the more complicated ones, and in looking for the flush button, I pushed a green button that looked reasonable. Well, it was an alarm button. A horn sounded, the lights turned on and off and so on and so on. Made me deeply suspicious of all buttons for the rest of the trip. At this point, I hoped my adventures were over, but no. I had a most interesting night on the 12th floor of the hotel when the typhoon Melor passed over (as a side note, I began to feel jinxed, because I ran into Melor a second time when in California a few days later after it had crossed the Pacific).
Anyway, enough of the light stuff, now let’s discuss the meat! SSDM is a big conference (~1000 people) where the various conference sessions include papers ranging from energy systems to organic semiconductors. Of the most interest to me were the sessions focusing on the various approaches for continued gate scaling through improved short channel control.
High-k metal gate is the primary path for improved short channel control. Intel leads the pack in this area, with its recent 32nm announcement demonstrating successful second-generation high-k metal gate (http://www.intel.com/technology/architecture-silicon/32nm/index.htm). Note that much of the industry is trying to “catch up” to Intel, with significant discussion industry-wide on the correct architecture for the gate (gate-first or replacement, one metal or two, and so on) with representative SSDM papers such as those presented by Drs. Ikeda, Kim and Fukutome. There is also significant research on gate materials, shown with papers such as those from Drs. Kadoshima and Inumiya. Another area of strong research is fundamental physics of the HiK-metal gate materials system, with SSDM papers such as those by Drs. Hsieh and Shimizu.
Advanced device architectures are another path for improved short channel control. This include ultra thin body (UTB) devices, vertical thin body devices (for example, trigate and Finfet), and lateral nanowire devices. UTB devices are the simplest of the new architectures, with short channel control offered by a thin body, and with fabrication being an extension of historical processing. An additional advantage of UTB devices is excellent random variation due to the undoped depleted body (several interesting SSDM papers in this area, including the papers of Drs. Andrieu and Lee). The problem is that UTB devices are expensive (SOI is NOT cheap), and quite sensitive to variation in the body thickness (changes in body thickness affect VT from quantum effects, and also impact DIBL and SS)). In addition, the thin body creates high external resistance and makes it extremely difficult to strain the devices.
Multiple gate (MuGFET) devices such as FinFETs or Trigates are a longer term path for improved short channel control. These devices mitigate many of the variation issues with UTB devices (because the desired fin width is greater than 2X of the equivalent body thickness in an UTB device.) HOWEVER, the non-planarity of these devices represents significant challenges in fabrication. Dr. Veloso’s paper nicely explored many of these challenges in some detail. Lateral nanowire devices are next in the logical sequence, again offering significant advantages for short channel control, but at the cost of challenging fabrication. While nanowires offer further short channel benefit, they have all the issues of FinFETs, along with a host of new issues, many of which were explored in papers from Drs. Chen, Seike, Lee and others.
I had a lot of fun, and learned some new things. As a wonderful closure for the trip, as we were leaving Narita airport (after pushback and just as the plane started to taxi on its own) all the line service folks (the people who fuel the plane etc.) lined up and waved and then bowed the plane off. “What a wonderful custom,” I thought, as I waved back.
posted by Bryan Rhoads on October 21, 2009
Fantastic first day and night in San Francisco for the 2009 Web 2.0 Summit. Intel sponsored last night’s reception in the courtyard at the Westin, right before Carly Fiorina almost declared that she was running for the California Senate. John Battelle tried to coax the answer out of her to no avail.
Complete Video recap of Day One is here.
Day 2 promises to hold some interesting technology topics on tomorrow’s web.
First up: Nokia on Social Location - Nokia OVI is a new platform based on GPS utilizing social location apps, currently shipping w/ many of its devices and mobile phones.
Nokia talked about how the ways of connecting people have changed. Users are increasingly connecting to different services, cloud objects, etc. in addition to the traditional direct dials/texts to individuals. Massive growth in Social Networking is a common prediction, now measured as the 4th most popular online activity. Mobile users will continue to demand more SNS (Social Networking Services), yet with Mobile, a entirely new usage model will need to evolve to satisfy unique mobile needs. The mobile and location-aware client is expanding the current SNS landscape.
The oft quoted “Mobile is the next big thing” is true. However, the current SNS services will need to evolve to meet new mobile usage models, or fail to other future SNS that take better advantage of a mobile user base. Nokia is on the right path by opening up their API to a developer community, taking advantage of new location data in new apps.
My biggest question is w/ GPS itself. How can a 1970’s technology and 1.0 approach to connection serve us in the 2.0 and increasing 3.0 World? For one, indoors is potentially the biggest problem. Another is the focal point. It’s all about the (dumb) client. In other words, it is the “I’m here” technology, just like the 1970’s was the “Me” decade. Meaning these mobile devices only have “receive-only” location capabilities via broadcasted GPS positioning data.
When will location devices become 2.0? 2.0 devices that are able to share their location in a mesh architecture. I.e. my netbook communicating w/ my mobile device, with my keys and my car going 70mph in an urban canyon? And more importantly, the car next to me so I don’t crash!
Nokia’s looking at the Indoor problem w/ a-GPS and Wi-Fi mapping of nodes for location data. As are many other device and component manufacturers, that’s all fine and good. It’s the 2.0 lens that I’m craving. I want to know if my Facebook friends or Twitter followers are sitting behind me in this conference room. Or, if anyone on my plane is heading to the same hotel so we can share a cab. When will my devices know where they are in relation to each other? That’s when LBS and social location will really take off.
For now, Ovi by Nokia will be an interesting service to watch for Location Based Services.
Comments (3)
tagged: GPS, Nokia, Social Location, Social Media
posted by Bill Calder on October 20, 2009
Today, a small team of engineers will be recognized at the Computer History Museum for designing the world’s first programmable microprocessor in 1971, 
a 4-bit parallel CPU with 2,300 transistors. That project, from a fledgling integrated memory manufacturer barely 3 years old, was a significant achievement that one can honestly say changed the world.
The Intel 4004 was the first general purpose microprocessor that could be customized with software to perform different functions on different devices. The rest, as they say, is history. The 4004 spawned a new era in both hardware AND software, along with an unrelentless quest for silicon integration that continues to this day. That is why the team of Federigo Faggin, Ted Hoff, Stanley Mazor, and Masatoshi Shima are being recognized tonight at the Computer History Museum.
As Intel heralds its “rock star” engineers through the popular Sponsors of Tommorrow campaign, it’s worth noting that these guys were the original rock stars who defined innovation and integration nearly 40 years ago. Even the 4004 itself grew into something of a star over the years. There are multiple pages dedicated to it, including intel4004.com which focuses on Faggin’s role, an interesting digital archeology project done a few years ago with the Intel museum, fun facts, wiki pages, and more. It remains one of the hottest of semiconductor collectibles and can fetch hundreds of dollars on eBay. As part of the company’s 35th Anniversary, Intel even made the original schematics and mask designs available for non-commercial use. So as we fast forward into an era of hundreds of millions even billions of transistors on a single chip and more and more functionality being integrated directly on to the CPU, it’s worth taking a look back. To pause and say thank you to the original rock stars of the semiconductor world. Congratulations guys, you spawned an entire industry or two in the process of figuring out how to make a single chip do the task of many. For a calculator no less. Who knew?
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tagged: 4004, Computer history, Intel, microprocessors, sponsors of tommorrow
posted by Nick Knupffer on October 19, 2009
I rarely write about topics with such vigour, but this latest video from a so-called documentary team is absolute and utter rubbish. There is no evidence whatsoever that the Intel Xeon 5500 processor can create the kind of data centre disruption witnessed in the documentary. In the spirit of openness, here is the video I am referring to:
Here is the text that accompanied the video:
** Intel takes great pride in its new ‘Nehalem’ based Xeon Processors. They tout the fact that because of their incredible performance and power efficiency, the ROI benefit effectively makes them ‘Cash Machines’ for IT. See: http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/44213/135/
But the truth is far darker, someone has to hold them accountable.
See: http://blogs.intel.com/technology/2009/10/intelprovesnehalem-ep_proces.php and http://blog.internetnews.com/apatrizio/2009/10/nehalem-is-proving-to-be-intel.html for more details.**
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tagged: awesome, data center, intel, nehalem, roi, xeon, Xeon 5500
posted by Ken Kaplan on October 16, 2009
PBS-TV’s MotorWeek visited Intel headquarters recently. Steven Chupnick wanted to learn how the tiny, mighty Intel Atom processor can help automakers stay in step with consumer trends. He met with Staci Palmer, director of Intel’s In-Vehicle Infotainment, Embedded and Communications Group, who talked about how computer technology can connect autos to the Internet to bring information, entertainment and even maintenance services anywhere the auto goes.
Here’s a collection of photos that I used to create a quick video and photo slideshow of Steve shooting around the Intel Headquarters.
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tagged: Embedded, IDF09, In-Vehicle Infotainment, Intel Atom, MotorWeek, PBS
posted by Nick Knupffer on October 07, 2009
When Intel launched “Nehalem-EP,” more commonly known as the Intel Xeon 5500 Series processors back in March, we pointed out that their energy-efficient performance and other attributes lead to a very quick return on investment - as soon as eight months. Pat Gelsinger and Kirk Skaugen even referred to the new servers as literally becoming “Cash Machines for IT.”
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tagged: awesome, bmw, data center, Dreamworks, humana, intel, Nehalem, server, Xeon, Xeon 5500
posted by Bryan Rhoads on October 06, 2009
The Intel Core i7 Custom Challenge has started in 8 countries.
To celebrate the launch of our new family of Intel® Core™ i7 and Core™ i5 processors, Intel is challenging the world’s best mod enthusiasts to rock the world in the Intel® Core™ i7 Custom Desktop Challenge.
The contest is promoted in coordination with our Intel Channel Partner members and sponsors: Computer Power User Magazine, Extreme Tech, PC Mag.
To do list:
Check out the Contest Website www.intelcorechallenge.com
Build a Core i5 or Core i7 desktop that demonstrates a bold vision of a creative future.
Enter your Mod in the Mod Creativity category, or Lifestyle Innovation, or both.
Submit pictures or video of your Mod creation to win over USD $10K in prizes (netbooks, SSDs, processors, etc.)
Submissions need to be recieved by November 16, 2009 (11:59 p.m. PDT). Winners will be selected on or about December 14, 2009 and announced on or about December 14, 2009.
Good luck!
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tagged: Core i5, Core i7, Desktop Challenge, Mod, modding
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