Intel 45nm Processors

Intel announced to use 45 nanometer transistors for next generation Intel Core 2 Duo, Intel Core 2 Quad and Xeon families. Currently there are five early-version products up and running using this 45nm transistors. Intel’s next-generation 45nm family of products, called Penryn will be targeted to five most famous operating systems, Windows* Vista*, Mac OS X*, Windows* XP and for sure: Linux

Intel expect, this transistor technology will allows the company to continue delivering record-breaking processor speeds, while reducing the amount of electrical leakage from transistors that can hamper chip and PC design, size, power consumption, noise and costs.

Intel will use a new material with a property called high-k, for the transistor gate dielectric, and a new combination of metal materials for the transistor gate electrode. This technology will increases performance and drastically reduces transistor leakage. The implementation of high-k marks big significant change in transistor technology since the introduction of polysilicon gate MOS transistors in the late 1960.

Transistors are tiny logical switches of the digital world. The gate turns the transistor on and off and the gate dielectric is an insulator underneath it that separates it from the channel where current flows. The combination of the metal gates and the high-k gate dielectric leads to transistors with very low current leakage.

Intel's 45nm process technology also improves transistor density by approximately two times that of the previous generation, allowing the company to either increase the overall transistor count or to make processors smaller. Because the 45nm transistors are smaller than the previous generation, they take less energy to switch on and off, reducing active switching power by approximately 30 percent. Intel will use copper wires with a low-k dielectric for its 45nm interconnects for increased performance and lower power consumption. It will also use innovative design rules and advanced mask techniques to extend the use of 193nm dry lithography to manufacture its 45nm processors because of the cost advantages and high manufacturability it affords.

The Penryn family of processors is a derivative of the Intel Core microarchitecture and marks the next step in Intel's rapid cadence of delivering a new process technology and new microarchitecture every other year. The combination of Intel's leading 45nm process technology, high-volume manufacturing capabilities, and leading microarchitecture design enabled the company to already develop its first working 45nm Penryn processors. Penryn family of 45nm processors includes new microarchitecture features for greater performance and power management capabilities.

Source: Intel