IBM Ramps Up Chip’s Speed by Cooling It Down
Researchers at IBM and the Georgia Tech have gotten a SiGe—or silicon-germanium—chip to run at 500GHz by freezing it to minus 451 degrees Fahrenheit.
The chip speed is a record for silicon-based processors and is 250 times faster than what is normally found in chips in cell phones, which run at about 2GHz. Processors in servers and PCs run at up to 3.8GHz.
The experiments, announced June 20, was part of a larger project designed to test the speed limits of SiGe devices, which run faster at lower temperatures. According to the researchers, the chips used in the project—prototypes of fourth-generation SiGe technology developed by IBM on a 200-millimeter wafer—run at about 350GHz at room temperature.
A temperature of minus 451 degrees is normally only found in outer space, though it can be re-created on Earth through the use of such materials as liquid helium. According to IBM, absolute zero—the coldest possible temperature in nature—is at minus 459.67 degrees. [Read.On]