Chip breaks speed record in deep freeze
Michael Kanellos
CNET News.com
June 20, 2006, 09:15 BST
IBM and Georgia Tech scientists cryogenically froze a
silicon-germanium chip at -451 F to test the material's speed
potential
IBM and Georgia Tech have coaxed a chip to run at 500GHz, a record
for a silicon-based device, by dropping the temperature to minus
451 degrees Fahrenheit.
The experiment is part of a project to explore the ultimate speed
limits of silicon-germanium (SiGe) chips. SiGe chips are similar to
standard silicon chips, but they also contain germanium for better
performance and lower power consumption.
Adding germanium, however, increases the price of producing wafers
and chips that come out of the wafers, so SiGe chips are typically
only found in a few select markets. IBM has sold hundreds of
millions of SiGe chips since it began selling them in 1998, but the
cell phone industry gobbles up billions of plain silicon chips
annually. (Germanium is sprinkled into standard silicon chips:
Intel adds minute amounts of the element to create strained silicon
in its processors).
At room temperature, the IBM-Georgia Tech chip operates at
350GHz, or 350 billion cycles per second. That's
far faster than standard PC processors today, which range from
3.8GHz to 1.8GHz. But SiGe chips can gain additional
performance in colder temperatures.
To that end, IBM and Georgia Tech scientists turned down the
temperature and cryogenically froze the chip at minus 451 F. It's
about as cold as things get. An extremely cold temperature like
that is found naturally only in outer space, but can be
artificially achieved on Earth using ultracold materials such as
liquid helium. Absolute zero comes at minus 459 F.
SiGe chips, the scientists theorised, could eventually hit
1 terahertz, or 1 trillion cycles a second.
Ultimately, high-performance SiGe chips could be used in military
systems, space exploration vehicles and remote sensing.
