California, Dec. 12 (U.S.): Intel research teams on Saturday unveiled work that the company believes will help it keep computing chips accelerating and shrinking over the next 10 years, with several technologies aimed at stacking bits of chips on top of each other. else.
Intel’s Research Components Group presented work on research papers at an international conference in San Francisco. The Silicon Valley Company is working to regain the leadership in making the smallest, fastest chips that it has lost in recent years to competitors such as Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co and Samsung Electronics Co Ltd.
While Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger has laid out business plans aimed at regaining that leadership by 2025, the research work revealed on Saturday gives a look at how Intel plans to compete beyond 2025, according to Reuters.
One way Intel is packing more computing power into chips is by stacking “squares” or “chips” in three dimensions rather than making the chips all as one two-dimensional piece. Intel showed work Saturday that would allow 10 times the number of connections between stacked tiles, meaning more complex tiles could be stacked on top of each other.
However, perhaps the biggest advance shown Saturday was a research paper outlining a method for stacking transistors — tiny switches that make up the basic building blocks of chips by representing 1’s and 0s for digital logic — on top of each other.
Intel believes this technology will produce a 30% to 50% increase in the number of transistors that can be packed into a given area on a chip. The increase in the number of transistors is the main reason why chips have been constantly increasing in speed over the past 50 years.
“By stacking devices directly on top of each other, we obviously save space,” Paul Fisher, director and chief engineer at Intel Components Research Group told Reuters in an interview. “We are working to reduce interconnection lengths and really save energy, which makes this not only more cost effective, but also results in better performance.”
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