”Zhi Chen, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering, found that applying rapid thermal processing directly on gate insulators – used to control current flow of transistors in computer chips – can dramatically reduce the chips’ leakage current and correspondingly the power consumption. In fact, the technique can improve the insulating qualities of gate insulators so that their direct tunneling current is reduced by 10,000 to 100,000 times. No effect was found if rapid thermal processing was not directly applied on the gate insulators.” The team of scientists are expected to present its report on December 7-9 at International Semiconductor Device Research Symposium. This discovery might be very important for future processor development we hope to hear more about this soon. Source: EurekAlert!Those who are following the processor manufacturers’ work and effort to create new technologies are aware of that it is’nt easy to shrink the manufacturing process. Intel found out when it started to develop its 90nm Prescott core. The 90nm technology had some serious problems with power leakage, which both increased power consumption and the processor’s heat dissipation. Even if Intel since then has gotten the problem under control the risk for power leakage can occur each time you go to a smaller process. Now it seems that researches in Great Britain has found a drastic move to reduce the power leakage with capacitors in a circuit.
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