February 6, 2001

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Hi-Tech Copper Seen at Heart of New Microchips

Reproduced with the permission of Reuters News Service

NEW YORK, February 6 (Reuters) -- For decades, the world's top microchip makers sought to harness copper's superior electrical conductivity to build microprocessors that were faster, smaller and more efficient than problem-ridden aluminium chips.

Finally, in December, International Business Machines Corp. leapt into production with new technology boasting the smallest copper circuits ever developed and improved materials, allowing for more layers of memory and more processing power.

The ground-breaking development is crucial to driving energy-hungry applications like speech recognition and wireless video in the next generation of electronic devices from computers to cell phones.

IBM's new technology, named CMOS 9S, uses new high-speed transistors -- the on/off switches that act as a chip's brains -- bridged to miles of microscopic copper wiring with circuits as small as 0.13 microns, or nearly 800 times thinner than a human hair.

This allows copper microchips to operate at least 25 to 30 times faster than other chips in production, at speeds in the multi-gigahertz range, chip analyst Fred Zeiber of Pathfinder Research in San Jose, California, told Reuters.

Now IBM's competitors in the semiconductor industry like Motorola Inc., Intel Corp. and Advanced Micro Devices Inc. are scrambling to close IBM's two-to-three-year lead in copper-based chip technology, experts say.

"Practically every major manufacturer is right now either bringing copper into mainstream production or has already done it," said Risto Puhakka, an analyst at VLSI Research in San Jose.

Know-how for copper wires

In 1997 IBM first unveiled the know-how for using copper wires, rather than the traditional aluminium interconnects, to link transistors in chips, although copper was and is a long way off from displacing aluminium in chips on production lines.

"Three years ago, whole world demand for copper used in semiconductor chips would have fitted into a knapsack, whereas the aluminium that has been used historically in chips, and is still in the majority of chips, is still being shipped by the boat load," said Richard Doherty, Director of Research at Long Island, New York consultant Envisioneering.

At this point, copper's use in the industry is now going up at a geometric rate of adoption, quarter by quarter, as other manufacturers tap into it, Doherty said.

Aluminium presented problems as chips evolved into smaller, multi-layered, more complex processors, and the wiring was becoming unreliable.

Increasingly, aluminium circuits were restricting the flow of electrical current, creating signal delay between the millions of transistors inside a chip.

But integrating miniaturised copper with a chip's other components had posed its own set of challenges as copper tended to oxidise easily and its impurities weakened materials around it.

Latest breakthrough

IBM's latest breakthrough, CMOS 9S, connects copper with silicon-on-insulator (SOI) transistors and "low-k dielectric" insulation, which shields the copper and reduces electrical interference between wires.

SOI is key in enabling fully-functional mainstream microprocessors, the most complex type of chip, to run faster while also requiring less power.

Story by Zach Howard

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