Researchers at IBM have come up with a new approach to building
transistors that could lead to faster, more energy-efficient
chips in a few years. The company has managed to combine both
strained silicon and a silicon insulator into the same wafer.
Strained silicon improves electron mobility, or the speed at
which electrons can travel through silicon. Silicon insulators
reduce leakage, or the amount of energy inadvertently
dissipated, a major problem facing chip designers today. The
combination design, which will begin to appear in chips later
this year, can improve transistor performance by as much as 20
percent to 30 percent. Read more: [URL=http://news.zdnet.co.uk/h
ardware/chips/0,39020354,39116210,00.htm]ZDNet[/URL].