By Julian Goldsmith, 8 October 2001 07:45
NEWS Intel will today unveil a chip packaging technology which should increase its semiconductors' processing power by around ten times over the next five years. The new technology will allow chips to be made that contain over a billion transistors and run at 20GHz. The 2GHz Pentium 4 has only 42 million transistors. The chip dispenses with the tiny solder balls, which secure the microprocessor core, or die, to the packaging. These solder balls transmit current and data from the motherboard to the processor. Called Bumpless build-up layer (BBUL), the chip has the die placed directly into the packaging, doing without three of the seven layers that comprise conventional processors such as the Pentium 4. Gerald Marcyk, director of Intel's components research lab, told Reuters: "This allows us to have higher performance, thinner packages and eventually lower power. Getting the silicon coplanar with the rest of the package, that is, embedding it, that's the real invention."
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