Re: further newsbit on those new IBM transistors

From: Dani Eder (danielravennest@yahoo.com)
Date: Tue Jun 26 2001 - 12:59:19 MDT


The following quote gives a number of 10 picoseconds
(=100 GHz). 0.18 microns is the current feature
size in CPU chips. So the implication is the
200 GHz new value is a factor of 2 improvement over
what we have now.

"IBM was able to cut channel-switching delay using SOI
and thereby boost chip performance significantly over
its current copper-based PowerPC chips that use bulk
technology. Shahidi said a ring oscillator circuit, a
benchmark widely used in the chip industry to measure
transistor speed, has delay of less than 10
picoseconds with a channel length of 0.12 microns
using a 0.22-micron CMOS process. That's comparable
with transistor speeds exhibited by Intel's
0.18-micron process based on bulk CMOS, which uses
shorter channel lengths because of its smaller line
widths, he said."

--- "Eliezer S. Yudkowsky" <sentience@pobox.com>
wrote:
> Dani Eder wrote:
> >
> > You need to keep clear the distinction between the
> > transistor switching speed, which may be 100 GHz,
> > and the chip clock speed, which is the transistor
> > speed divided by the number of transistors in
> series
> > involved in one clock cycle. The very shortest
> > cycle would be a flip-flop type oscillator, which
> > would take 2 transistors. More typically it would
> > take 5-10 transistors in series to complete a
> logic
> > operation.
>
> What's the actual switching speed of a modern-day
> transistor in a 1GHz
> Pentium?
>
> -- -- -- --
> --
> Eliezer S. Yudkowsky
> http://intelligence.org/
> Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for
> Artificial Intelligence

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