Intel, here are the general plans for the 22nm technology and beyond

The announcement of the production process to transition to 22nm is not new for Intel. In early May we were able to make contact for the first time, in some detail, with this new production technology by means of a conference dedicated to it, which you can find a summary in this article. If the move to increasingly sophisticated manufacturing technologies is not new, it is the radical change in the structure of transistors, as is the case with the transition to 22nm from Intel.

We can summarize the benefits of new technology, citing the use of tri-gate transistors 3D. To date, more than 40 years, has made use of the gate flat, pushing technology to the limit and with the improvements due to technological progress guaranteed. Today, Intel has explained why the move to 3D transistors, and why now. The realization of planar 22nm chip would not have guaranteed the benefits expected, especially in terms of energy consumption due to the high dispersion.

The aim of the designers of transistors are clear: to maximize the flow of current when the transistor is in ON state, minimizing the flow itself when it is OFF, as well as speeding up the transition from one state to another. The new transistors trigano work with lower voltages, while dissipating less power. Gain and efficiency, for which, at low voltages, the change of state on-off is 37% faster than conventional transistors, with a direct impact on performance.

Also according to Intel, the 3D nature of the new transistors (which have as a "fin" in the middle), allowing designers to choose whether to fulfill a certain freedom transistors, chips and then, put it on top performance or consumption, second of the final application. Here enter the stage consumption: Intel IDF in this is giving a lot of room for mobile solutions, smart phones and tablet PCs on all areas where energy consumption is more important than anything else. This is a change of no small matter considering the approach much more from a PC or server "traditional" that marked Intel during its history.



Until now the approach has been to separate the study groups in terms of design architectures. Client and server chipsets on the one hand, net books, CE and other embedded. If it is the case, these two groups were justified by the fact the head to one side to standard architectures, SoC, on the other. With the recent production of client and server processors, however, the differences were very thin and even in design, since we find the section integrated graphics, memory controller and so on. This explains why the unification in progress between apparently different working groups for the purpose.



Direct consequence of this approach will be to develop contemporary solutions with different uses have the same production process. In the slide we can see that in the future there will be a gradual alignment of the products according to the manufacturing process, which will still be developed by taking into account the priorities of performance, other than energy savings. The current focus is to convince the public and the producers of the goodness of SoC solutions for mobile, where the gap to be filled is wider, which will be made with refined production processes and low consumption, according to a statement.

Posted by: Wasim Javed