News

itwire: The laws of physics have threatened to bring Moore’s Law to a grinding halt as transistors are shrunken to the size of a few atoms. However, Intel it will bring new 45nm chip technology to market in 2007 that will continue to allow it to double the number of transistors on a processor. IBM plans to follow suit with its own solution in 2008.

Moore’s Law, which stipulates that the number of transistors will double on chips about every two years, was facing the spectre of breakdown because of the increasing leakage of current as transistors get smaller and the layer of insulating silicon layer inside them gets thinner.

Intel has shrunk the silicon dioxide gate dielectric to as little as 1.2nm thick – equal to five atomic layers – on its 65nm process technology, but the continued shrinking has led to increased current leakage through the gate dielectric, resulting in wasted electric current and unnecessary heat.

To overcome the problem of current leakage across super thin layer of silicon, Intel is using new materials to build the insulating walls and switching gates of its 45nm transistors. Intel says the new technology will dramatically reduce leakage and allow double the amount of transistors to be placed on the same sized chips.

itwire: Intel has announced what it claims is “one of the biggest advancements in fundamental transistor design” in 40 years, saying it will enable it to build chips with 45 nanometre transistors later this year. IBM has made a similar announcement but does not plan to have its first chips out until 2008

Intel says it already has the world’s first 45nm CPUs in-house and that these are the first of at least fifteen 45nm processor products under development. Intel claims that its 45nM transistors - 30,000 of which would fit on a pin head - “significantly improve performance to deliver faster multi-core processors that consume less power.” Intel says its demonstration of a functional 45nm CPU is proof of at least a 12 month lead over the rest of the semiconductor industry.

In an move perhaps designed to stop Intel grabbing all the limelight, IBM announced shortly after Intel that, working with AMD and its other development partners Sony and Toshiba, it had “found a way to construct a critical part of the transistor with a new material, clearing a path toward chip circuitry that is smaller, faster and more power-efficient than previously thought possible. “

itwire: An Apple framework used by network applications has an exploitable bug, claims the Month of Apple Bugs project.

According to LMH, the CFNetwork (a framework that provides abstractions for network protocols) fails to handle certain HTTP responses correctly, and sending such a response to an application using the framework is likely cause a crash.

Although this bug does not of itself allow the execution of arbitrary code, LMH says it can be combined with the privilege escalation vulnerability revealed on day 22.

No user-applicable workarounds are offered. Programmers are advised to add their own checking of HTTP responses, at least until Apple fixes the underlying issue.

TechNewsWorld: In a breakthrough that suggests the continuing validity of Moore’s Law, researchers have developed a memory chip as small as a human blood cell that sets a record for integration density in a man-made object. The memory circuit is a “milestone in manufacturing,” the scientists claimed.

Researchers say they’ve created the world’s densest memory circuit, about 100 times denser than today’s standard memory unit and as small as a human white blood cell.

Although mass production could still be a decade away and the chip contains only a modest capacity of 160,000 bits of information, the achievement points to the possible exponential growth of computing power.

Speeding Up the Future
The memory circuit is a “milestone in manufacturing,” said the team led by chemistry professor James Heath of the California Institute of Technology and J. Fraser Stoddart, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, in announcing their achievement in the journal Nature.

“It’s the sort of device that Intel (Nasdaq: INTC)  would contemplate making in the year 2020,” said Heath, who is the Gilloon Professor at Caltech. “But at the moment it furthers our goal of learning how to manufacture functional electronic circuitry at molecular dimensions.”