IBM plans to mass produce chips next year using a method of insulating against electricity loss that promises to combine a rise in operating speeds by up to 30% with a factor of three drop in power consumption and only a 10% price hike. One of the physical limits of chips that manufacturers have been trying to address is silicon’s tendency to absorb some of the electricity that travels across the chip and thereby reduce the chip’s efficiency. IBM, and the industry in general, through the Sematech Consortium, has been working for fifteen years to combat this problem of electricity absorption with the so-called silicon on insulator process, which is already used in military and space applications. Previous remedies have included such high cost fix-its as insulating the silicon with sapphire, whose crystals have a very similar structure to those of silicon. But IBM has only recently devised a means to keep the SOI process low-cost enough to drive it into mass production. IBM’s process – on which it has about 50 patents pending – involves oxidizing silicon, then heating and cooling it very slowly in order to form a very fine layer of insulating silicon dioxide, said a spokesperson. The silicon on insulator process, which is currently in the pilot production stage, can be used as an insulator for aluminum chips, but it is more likely to make its mass market debut in the first half of next year on IBM’s new copper chips. IBM is among the many manufacturers focusing on systems-on a chip and will use the combination of copper and silicon on insulation to boost their efficiency. Devices that could use IBM’s insulated chips include mobile phones and personal digital assistants, where low power consumption is at a premium. The first IBM machines to see the benefits of SOI treated chips will be IBM’s Power PC based System 390, AS400 and RS 6000. The company will concentrate on applying the silicon sealing process to its slimmer 0.2 micron chips, although will add it to 0.25 micron chips if customers demand it. IBM has no plans to license the technology to third parties, but it does have an agreement with STMicroelectonics NV, which will both act as a second source for IBM and work with the company on developing systems-on-a-chip. IBM, which was first to make it to market with copper chips, hopes its new mass-market silicon on insulation will put it at least one year ahead of its competitors. Meanwhile Intel Corp says that its own research has indicated that the benefits of SOI are too small to make it worth implementing for the significant future, and says that its performance impacts are limited especially on future technologies.
