A Georgia Tech research team paired with IBM has recently demonstrated new Silicon-Germanium transistors capable of operation at over 500GHz. That is roughly 250 times faster than the transistors found in your common cell phone. These experimental transistors attained this speed at a temperature 451 degrees Farenheit below zero through the use of liquid helium. Researchers say that at room temperature these chips can operate at 350GHz.
SiGe is a process technology in which the electrical properties of silicon, the material underlying virtually all modern microchips, is augmented with germanium to make chips operate more efficiently. SiGe boosts performance and reduces power consumption in chips that go into cellular phones and other advanced communication devices.
Source: GT Research News
Once optimized, these fourth generation SiGe chips should be able to run at near Terahertz frequencies at room temperature. There are many advantages to including Germanium into the transistor manufacture process. However, the most substantial benefit is the ability to mass-produce these transistors with current silicon-based fabrication techniques. I eagerly await the time when I will be using a computer powered by a processor made completely from Silicon-Germanium transistors like these.
The black squares are the Silicon-Germanium transistors being developed at the Georgia Electronic Design Center on Georgia Tech campus.
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It has been know for a while that other combinations of the column III, IV, and V elements have much better qualities than silicon-silicon, but silicon has had its glory because its the second most abundant element found in nature (sand).
I’m pretty certain that Silicon-Germanium based processors are already in the works for AMD and Intel along with the “advanced Silicon-Germanium” processors. These new processes will be what keeps us from having to shrink the die even further for clock speed bumps. 2007 should be another great year for computing just as the middle of 2006 will be.
Where’s the bottleneck in terms of speed + performance at the moment? CPU? Bus? RAM? Graphics?
Well with Conroe coming out, DDR2-1100 coming soon, and 1333MHz FSB, I do believe graphics will be the limiting factor in regards to gaming. There are reports of the new 975x chipset hitting FSB’s well over 1800MHz and with Conroe killing world records @ 3.5-4 GHz, the only thing holding us back are the graphics cards. Those also happen to be the most expensive component of a gaming computer also.
Joel,
I would put my money on the bus, espcially since the advent of the multi-core architectures. I seems like they will need to start implementing independent FSBs to each core to keep up with the performance improvements.
In reguards to graphics, I wouldn’t know (haven’t been a gammer since the PS1) but suspect that video cards are getting more and more like thier own computer.