Intel shows research for packing more computing power into chips beyond 2025
Research teams at Intel Corp on
Saturday unveiled work that the company believes will help it keep speeding up
and shrinking computing chips over the next ten years, with several
technologies aimed at stacking parts of chips on top of each other.
Intel's Research Components
Group introduced the work in papers at an international conference being held
in San Francisco. The Silicon Valley company is working to regain a lead in
making the smallest, fastest chips that it has lost in recent years to rivals
like Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co and Samsung Electronics Co Ltd.
While Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger
has laid out commercial plans aimed at regaining that lead by 2025, the
research work unveiled Saturday gives a look into how Intel plans to compete
beyond 2025.
One of the ways Intel is packing
more computing power into chips by stacking up "tiles" or
"chiplets" in three dimensions rather than making chips all as one
two-dimension piece. Intel showed work Saturday that could allow for 10 times
as many connections between stacked tiles, meaning that more complex tiles can
be stacked on top of one another.
But perhaps the biggest advance
showed Saturday was a research paper demonstrating a way to stack transistors -
tiny switches that form the most basic building blocks of chips by representing
the 1s and 0s of digital logic - on top of one another.
Intel believes the technology
will yield a 30 per cent to 50 per cent increase in the number of transistors
it can pack into a given area on a chip. Raising the number of transistors is
the main reason chips have consistently gotten faster over the past 50 years.
"By stacking the devices
directly on top of each other, we're clearly saving area," Paul Fischer,
director and senior principal engineer of Intel's Components Research Group
told Reuters in an interview. "We're reducing interconnect lengths and
really saving energy, making this not only more cost-efficient, but also better
performing."