July 1, 2008
Intel sees leadership in a shrinking world
Intel celebrates its 40th anniversary this month, but in Moore’s Law fashion it is doubling down on its future more than looking back at its past.
Pat Gelsinger, senior vice president and a 29-year veteran, said yesterday he had planted a few trees to mark the occasion but he preferred to look ahead to how the world’s biggest chipmaker could maintain its dominance and technological momentum.
In a briefing for the semiconductor press, he talked about how, like a foggy road with 100-yard visibility, there was always 10 years of visibility opening up ahead on how Moore’s Law and miniaturisation could be extended.
Chip circuit widths were currently moving from 65 to 45 billionths of a metre and there was a clear path to 32, 22, 14-15 and even below 10 nanometres, he said. “Beyond that, we’re not sure yet.”
The size of the circular wafers that chips are cut from will actually grow from 300mm in diameter to 450mm between 2010 to 2015, in order to provide greater economies in manufacturing, giving savings of up to 40 per cent.
But the cost of the retooling will force consolidation and reduce the number of chip manufacturers to less than 10, he predicted.
“We used to have 100s of companies that built fabs, today we have tens of companies and, as we make this move, you will see single-digits of [manufacturers].”
There had been only three successful business models - large-scale production of a commoditised memory product as typified by Samsung, the foundry model of companies such as Taiwan’s TSMC and the vertically integrated model of Intel, he said.
It is no coincidence that those three companies announced in May that they were collaborating on leading the industry transition to 450mm wafers.
Mr Gelsinger said Intel spent more than $7bn on plant and equipment when it switched from 200mm to larger 300mm wafers in 2001 and it would cost more to go to 450mm.
Everybody investing less than $1bn a year in new fabs was falling off the rate needed to maintain the pace of Moore’s Law in shrinking transistors and growing wafer sizes, he said, hinting that Intel’s biggest rival, Advanced Micro Devices, would not be able to make the step up to 450mm.
AMD said in April it planned $900m in capital expenditure this year.
Silicon, the material that the semiconductor industry has built its success on, will be used more as scaffolding in the future, Mr Gelsinger said.
Only six elements of the periodic table were used when Intel made its first chips in the 60s, but Mr Gelsinger said more than half the periodic table ( of 117 elements) was now being used and this number would grow.
Germanium was being used to bend silicon and high-k metal gates using hafnium had been developed, with carbon nanotubes a possible material for the future.
But silicon would still remain, he said.
“This will all evolve on top of that silicon scaffolding and that will continue for as far as we can see into the future.”
