Texas Instruments Inc reckons it has stolen a march on its rivals with its perfection of 0.18 micron process technology, which it says will enable it to fabricate processor chips with the power of 20 current personal computers – once it succeeds in debugging what will be immensely complex designs. The company calls the process technology TImeline, and with the ability to put up to 125m transistors on a single chip, it will be able, for example, to fabricate Sparcs with say 512Kb cache and 64Mb memory all on the single chip – although enormous redundancy that eats real estate on the chip will have to be built in if early yields are not to be prohibitively poor. Texas reckons that chips based on the technology would enable a new generation of products such as picture-phones, computers with speech recognition or automatic teller machines that recognize a bank customer’s face or fingerprint, to be built using a single chip to handle the key functions. Such chips will also increase the battery life of mobile electronic devices such as cellular phones or laptops, because they will require less power than current technology. The company expects to ship its first parts next year. Texas is working with IMEC, a Belgian research institute, on 0.18 micron photolithography techniques. Fujitsu Ltd has announced 0.18 micron process plans on the same time-scale as Texas (CI No 2,735). It is generally agreed that a 0.18 micron process will be needed for fabricating 1G-bit memory chips.
