To date, the Santa Clara, California-based chip giant has largely been a sceptic when it comes to carbon nanotubes and many other futuristic chip technologies, but that fits a pattern. Intel often publicly questions the need or urgency for new technologies while quietly integrating them into future chips. When IBM first released silicon-on-insulator technology, an additional layer of material below the transistors which allows them to run cooler and faster, Intel said that SOI provided little benefit. Years later, the company said it would incorporate its own version of SOI into chips. Similarly, some Intel executives in 2001 questioned the need or functionality of strained silicon, a method of improving chip performance by spacing silicon atoms farther apart. In August, the company said strained silicon would be incorporated into "Prescott," the code name of the successor to the Pentium 4, due next year. As space age as it sounds, the nanotechnology era will actually begin in the second half of next year, when semiconductor companies begin to release their first chips made on the 90-nanometre process. Intel's first major foray into commercial nanotechnology manufacturing will be Prescott, which will be made on the 90-nanometre process and feature strained silicon. Subsequently, the decade will see the emergence of new types of packaging that will solve the problem of channeling substantial amounts of power into small chips, the use of optical technology inside computers and the emergence of Extreme Ultraviolet lithography, which uses light with a smaller wavelength to draw circuits. Chips with multiple cores, a design technique that both conserves energy and boosts performance, will also emerge. Also on the bill... The four-day conference will feature a number of other announcements. * Intel will provide updates on Madison, the successor to the Itanium II chip, due in the second half of 2003, and Banias, a new mobile chip coming in the first quarter. Both chips have been produced in samples. Banias is expected to come out at speeds hitting up to 1.6GHz. * Intel will also give details about the upcoming 3GHz Pentium 4. Hyper-threading, a technology available in Intel's server chips, will be available "very soon," according to a source at Intel. The circuitry for enabling hyper-threading is already incorporated in the Pentium 4 but is not activated. * The chip giant will discuss enhancements to its XScale chip, which is found inside handhelds and networking equipment. The improvements are geared toward better wireless use. * A host of companies will announce the formation of a group, tentatively called the Digital Home Working Group, to ensure the interoperability of wireless networks, and future PC and consumer-electronics technologies. * A final, proposed specification for Serial ATA II will come out. Serial ATA connects hard drives to the rest of the computer.
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