SRC helps blaze chip performance path for electronics in China, Asia and Japan

Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC), university-research consortium for semiconductors and related technologies, announced the success of its research with insulators containing the exotic metal hafnium toward extending Moore's Law. Tapping SRC's considerable research network, which spans a community of 23 companies and partners plus 100 universities worldwide, the chip industry can use hafnium-based insulators to take a giant leap toward staying on its aggressive technology roadmap.

Larry Sumney, CEO and president of the SRC, said, "The implications of hafnium-based insulators for the global chip business are revolutionary and have been heralded as the most promising advancements since the introduction of copper interconnect. Dedicated teamwork among several universities and industry has moved decades of research into the mainstream, with the first announcements of planned commercial applications of hafnium-based insulators in just the past few days."

Capitalizing on 10 years of SRC-funded research to find materials to replace widely used silicon dioxide in semiconductors, chip companies this week identified the hafnium-based insulators as instrumental to their planned breakthroughs for smaller, more powerful semiconductors.

Technology utilizing hafnium-based insulators allows for an improved layer of material that regulates the flow of electricity through the more than 2 billion transistors used in today's semiconductors. The SRC-funded research set the groundwork that helped the industry implement these insulators in the plans to continue manufacturing at least three more generations of chips, down to 22 nanometers (nm). The 22nm generation of chips is projected to go into production by 2016.

The benefits of the new technique can be leveraged in multiple ways. Transistors can be shrunk, potentially doubling their count on a chip. Their speed can be accelerated more than 20 percent. Power leakage can be reduced by up to 80 percent and power consumption reduced by half.

Bob Wallace, professor of electrical engineering and physics at the University of Texas at Dallas, who has worked with hafnium since the mid-90's to help win the duel between Moore's Law and nature's collective barrier to making smaller chips, stated, "The sun is shining on industry collaboration today. Just when the industry was hardest pressed to predict the next answers to the challenges facing the continued progress of the semiconductor, hafnium is brought to the rescue. This is a great milestone for the countless researchers who've contributed to the university-industry collaborative effort."

SRC