Will chip power hit a speed breaker?

with each passing day, microprocessors, the nerve centres of any electronic machine, are getting faster. and, fighting out this war are chip giants like intel and advanced micro devices. in june, amd released 1.4 ghz athlon processor and in july intel introduced pentium 4 with 1.8 and 1.6 ghz speeds. the companies have been definitely keeping up with the gordon moore's law.the law says every eighteen months, computing power will get doubled with advances in microprocessor technology and the prices will get halved. the pricing part has always been a topic of debate. but companies have been adjusting prices according to the market demand and competition pressures. however, questions are being raised by experts whether the users need and are ready to pay for the type of processing power being offered. "what will the increased processing power do? we do not have software and applications to utilise that power. after windows, there has been no useful application to effectively utilise the processing power of the pcs," says samir kochar, managing director, skoch consultancy. moreover, due to a downturn in the it sector, the global chip market that was pegged at $226 billion in 2000 by gartner has been predicted to slide to $188 billion this year. already weak sales of communications chips and flash memory, used in devices such as handheld computers and cell phones, have started pinching the chip makers. intel, the largest chipmaker in the world, saw its second quarter revenue go down by 24 per cent and amd total sales declined by approximately 11 per cent from the second quarter of 2000. further, there have been recent media reports questioning the life of moore's law. in fact, in 1997 intel's chairman, gordon moore, himself said that his law might conflict with the finite size of atomic particles. but software engineers and experts are confident of moore's law holding true for the microprocessor industry for another 15-17 years. and, to keep that extra mile advantage over its competition, chipmakers are going ahead with their quest for high-speed smaller processors. "for very high-end graphics, games and video, one needs high processing power. for desktop work, microprocessors with low speed will do. but for high-end we need more advanced processors," said sanjeev keshkar, amd country manager, india operations. experts further add that demand for higher processing power is not expected to come from desktops users but it is the wireless and third generation devices that will drive the chip industry on the fast track. one way to reduce the price of the chip is by cramming more transistors on it, which will give value addition for the customer without shelling out extra money. however, finding ways to put more transistors on the same chip size is itself an investment-intensive process. but the end result will increase efficiency of the machine without adding much to its cost. how a chip is made: the basic material used in any kind of chip is silicon. the term 'silicon valley' originates from the fact that microprocessor or memory chips are at the centre of computers and chips are made of silicon sheets. cutting a thin slice from a cylinder of silicon is the first step towards chip making. the thickness of the slice varies in nanometers. then a thin coat of a light sensitive chemical is applied on the wafer cut. light rays, which have very short wave length, are then passed through a mask, which has the designs of circuit to be created and acts as a stencil. the light sensitive chemical reacts and a circuit design is etched on the silicon slice. this process is repeated again and again. the designs overlap each other creating an integrated circuit on the silicon. the light photo mask technique used by conventional computer chipmakers can make is 0.1 micron wide chip circuits. where one micron is one-millionth of a meter. more complex circuit coupled with number of transistors decides the processing speed of the chip. however, this technique is tiring out and chipmakers are finding it difficult to make the chip smaller. so, the scientists have devised a method called the ultraviolet lithography to get more advanced chip circuit designs. today deep ultraviolet lithography is used to make very high-end chips. but extreme (or deep) ultraviolet chip printing is in its experimental stage. this will enable chips almost six times faster than those available today. experts say that with euv technique 0.03 microns wide chips with 10 ghz processor will be a reality by 2005. 1 hertz is one vibration per second and 1 giga hertz is 1,000,000,000 hertz. however, this technique developed problems as most materials absorb ultraviolet rays. to avoid this, instead of passing the light rays directly through the mask, euv uses mask mirrors to reflect the ultraviolet light on to the wafer. also, the high-speed smaller chips are power hungry and produce lot of heat that affects their performance level. apart from investments going into reducing the size and increasing the speed, lot of research has been going on to overcome this lacunae. experts also say that chips with lower speed can also give better performance. if the cache performance, the mechanism of quickly storing and retrieving information, is good then a low speed processor can be utilised better. thus, if cache levels of the microprocessors are improved, customers can get better value for their money even at a slightly lower speed.