A Brief Exploration Of Intel Corporation Processors And Transistor Manufacturing
J. Rice
ITT Technical Institute

The first Intel Corporation processor build with more than 2 billion transistors (2.04 billion) was code-named Tukwila for the generation of Intel's 4-Core Itanium platform / Mission Critical family, using a 65 nm transistor architecture. It was designed primarily for usage with remote access servers (RAS) and machine check architecture recovery (MCA). It was announced in the first quarter of 2008, but wasn’t moved to the consumer market until the first quarter of 2010, pricing between $946.00 and $3838.00, depending on device necessity.

The increased of transistor density on processors since the mid 1970’s has been incredible, but dramatically increased in 2011 when Intel Corporation announced production of their 22 nm 3-D Tri-gate transistor technology. It was a partial redesign of traditional 2-D planar (flat) transistor architecture, to a design that supported power transmission on three planes (3-Dimensions), increasing power output and speed, while decreasing power usage by device processes. Transistor size was reduced again in June 2014 when Intel announced a collaboration with Cadence Design Systems, Inc. to create 14 nm transistors, further improving design specs, and maintaining adherence to Moore’s Law.
There has been wide speculation that further reduction of transistor architecture could be difficult unless new materials and requisite manufacturing methods are used in their redesign. Silicon-germanium (SiGe), gallium arsenide (GaAs), indium-gallium-arsenide, and graphene have been suggested as possible alternatives for some currently used materials; Intel already employs hafnium in place of silicon for some applications.

Current industry discussion of using nanotube technology, however, suggests more immediate potential for further manufacturing advancement. IBM and Stanford University have invested in developing carbon nanotubes as a possible replacement for the time and industry tested silicon substrate for transistors; Stanford researchers actually announced in 2013 they’d created a computer using only carbon nanotube transistors. While not yet applied to computational transistors, researchers at the University of Texas have developed a phosphorene-based transistor with power indications easily comparable to similar graphene applications for flexible products.
Because of actual power loss by bleed-through, it’s difficult to say today how and when nanometer architecture for transistors will improve. Intel Corporation has made amazing strides in transistor manufacturing, but today it’s hard to find out if it was because of their own research and development, or if they used their buying power to purchase patents from companies that already had better production methods in development.

The Japanese company, NEC, was actually the first to announce it had produced the smallest known transistor back in December 2003 at 5 nm, even smaller that IBM’s 6 nm transistor announced a year earlier in December 2002, respectively seven and eight years ahead Intel’s above mentioned 65 nm architecture, even if they were unable to effectively put it into mass production.

Current Intel competition like Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), Advanced RISC Machines (ARM), Qualcomm, Nvidia, IBM, NEC, etc., have research and development departments with sections dedicated to improving their market share, whether creating something better from scratch, buying an obscure patent and making someone wealthy, or even entering into a collaborative effort like Cadence Design Systems did with Intel. As consumers, we likely won’t get to know the effort and back-story of how technology progresses; we will simply get to pay extravagantly at Christmas each year for what we hope will get us to the internet quicker………….or, if I can wait until Intel releases the 10 nm Cannonlake platform chips in 2016.

References
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