Hafnium ... takes us halfway there -- that is, to the blog posting of last Thursday.

Pretty looking stuff, isn't it?

Of course, you all remember hafnium from the song, "The Elements" written and sung [sic] by Tom Lehrer in the mid-sixties ... don't you? "Hafnium, titanium (pause, gasp for breath) zirconium and radium" was one of the lines as I recall (NOT!).

But that silliness aside, Intel announced a breakthrough in microprocessor manufacturing today (yesterday, according to my watch--it's after midnight in Ocean Shores), essentially the discovery of a new molecular compound material that will replace silicon dioxide in microprocessors using 45 nm and smaller lithographies. What I said in what I posted a little earlier this week was pointed towards 10 to 20 years from now; this new announcement by Intel will revolutionize chips only a year or so from about ten this morning ... or yesterday morning in Ocean Shores, Washington.

That was even before I saw The Queen (last posting) that so moved me.

If you wish to read the original three-page article and announcement (and skip what's below), go to the article that is linked here.

But whatever the time where you might be, on Friday morning Intel announced that it has developed working 45 nm processor samples running Microsoft Windows Vista, Mac OS X, Linux and God-only-knows what other operating systems, where this material, a compound based on the element hafnium, serves as the dielectric gate between the current source and the current drain. Hafnium or Hf has the atomic number 72 and is actually found in fake diamonds. Damn! Just when I had finally thrown away all of those pieces of jewelery that I picked up in Dubai while teaching for the American University there.

Hmm ... sounds like that Tom Lehrer song again. Hafnium is also found naturally in the impurities of, you guessed it -- zirconium.

(quoting here from Intel's announcement) With the hafnium material serving as the gate, Intel will then replace the polysilicon electrode layer with a metal electrode, the exact alloy used here also being kept secret. As a result, transistors for 45 nm semiconductors starting with Intel's Penryn family will be fabricated at half the size of those used in today's 65 nm Core 2 processors. At the same time, transistor switching power can be reduced by as much as 30%, while still obtaining a performance improvement of as much as 20%. And current leakage at the gate will be reduced by a factor of 10.

Intel's current processor roadmap leaps between processor technology families every two years. We saw the latest leap just last summer, from the last of the Pentium D dual-core processors at 90 nm, to the Conroe/Merom/Woodcrest series at 65 nm. But while this "high-k + metal gate" (HK+MG) development does play into Intel's planned leap to the Penryn architecture, Friday's revelation literally marks only the start of a second era in metal oxide semiconductor production.

Since the 1960s, the "gates" in chips have been made using silicon dioxide (SiO2), and electrodes have been made with polysilicon. Substrates are the third major material; Intel has used silicon or silicon germanium (SiGe), and the industry has experimented with gallium arsenide. HK+MG replaces two of the three compounds used in semiconductor transistors since the 1960s.

"These are not laboratory devices," Intel's director of process architecture and integration, Mark Bohr, announced Friday morning. "These are not just research results. We've actually made these transistors in a fully-integrated 45 nm CMOS process flow. We have high-k metal gate PMOS transistors [positive flow] and NMOS transistors [negative flow], both providing higher performance than the previous generation and lower leakage than the previous generation. This integrated process flow also meets our reliability requirements and is manufacturable in high volume."

The "k" in the term "high-k dielectrics" refers to a material's relative ability to hold an electric charge. In electrodynamics, it's actually written with the Greek lower-case letter kappa. The "kappa," if you will, of silicon dioxide is about 3.9. That number means nothing until you compare it to that of hafnium compounds. Intel has not revealed whether the compound it discovered is based a hafnium silicate or hafnium oxide. The "kappa" for pure hafnium silicates has been observed in a range between 15 and 25, while pure hafnium oxides have been observed at 40. Intel is likely using an "impure" compound for the sake of structural integrity; laboratory tests on hafnium oxides yielded observed "kappa" of over 16. So it's quite possible that Intel's new compound may be as much as four times more efficient than silicon dioxide at holding a charge. (Quote from Intel statement)

For the geeks among you, the diagram below (lifted from Intel's announcement) shows why such a metal will about double the speed of next year's chips while halving their sizes. The diagram (courtesy of Intel) depicts the differences between a first-generation MOS transistor and an HK+MG transistor to be used in Intel's Penryn 45 nm CPUs.