November
15, 1999
A blazingly fast
chip, a colorized plastic display, and a 6-million-pixel image sensor will take
center stage at an upcoming gathering of engineers touting the latest ideas from
their research labs. Every year, the movers and shakers in the chip industry
convene at the International Electron Devices Meeting to share their research
and provide important clues about where electronics technology will be three to
five years down the road.
One of the
highlights of this December's meeting in Washington, D.C., will be TRW's 69-GHz
transistor, which uses an expensive, exotic semiconductor material called indium
phosphide instead of silicon. Although the material is expensive and difficult
to work with, it produces blazingly fast transistors that could be useful for
high-speed optical communications systems.
Researchers from
Intel plan to show a 16Mb memory chip running at 1.06 GHz and using technology
that may one day push the clock frequencies of microprocessors beyond 1 GHz. A
major problem with operating integrated circuits at such high frequencies is
that they use as much power as light bulbs. With this technology, Intel
engineers were able to build the device so that it consumes less power.
Light Bright
Seiko Epson has come up with an active-matrix flat-panel display built from a
type of light-emitting plastic called phenylene vinylene (PPV). The researchers
have built a 5-cm-diagonal display using an economical ink jet deposition
process that essentially prints the display components.
Researchers from
Philips Semiconductors will present a new CCD (charge-coupled device) image
sensor for digital cameras that packs in 6 million pixels. That's 4 million
pixels more than high-end digital cameras today. According to Philips, the
resolution of the 6-million-pixel CCD is comparable to conventional 35-mm film,
a parity that the digital imaging world has long sought.
Rather than
presenting new electronic devices per se, several companies plan to present new
processes for building them. For example, Toshiba is working with air. It turns
out that gaps of air in silicon are excellent insulators, and researchers have
figured out how to manipulate silicon atoms to form air pockets of desired
shapes and sizes. In a sense, they've figured out how to build nothing.
Much of the
discussion at the conference will focus on the challenges researchers face in
trying to make smaller and smaller transistors. As chip components scale down to
atomic dimensions, leakage of current and undesirable electrical phenomena
become bigger problems. Although much progress has been made in packing more
transistors on a chip while keeping its overall dimensions the same, the
industry may be approaching the point where some of these problems will become
insoluble.
IEDM
Link for Conference Information
