Hmm, best wel stevig nieuws bij EETimes: IBM heeft een 0,18micron fabricageproces ontwikkelt dat middels een combinatie van silicium germanium transistors en koper-interconnects de produktie van chips met kloksnelheden tot 90GHz mogelijk maakt:
The company will present details of the technology here next week at the International Electron Devices Meeting (IEDM). Other IBM papers have discussed the company's work with SiGe during the past 18 months, much of which has been kept secret by IBM's customers.Perhaps the most intriguing fact about IBM's results is that the SiGe-copper parts can be produced on the company's standard CMOS manufacturing line in Burlington, Vt., using equipment already in place.
"We run the same process steps as CMOS on the same tools in the same factory," said Greg Freeman, the IBM senior engineer who will deliver the IEDM paper on the SiGe-copper technology.
The hybrid SiGe-copper devices, which were first produced a year ago by IBM researchers, are entering the sampling phase and have been turned over to OEMs for consideration in future products, said Bernie Meyerson, IBM director and general manager for telecommunications products. Meyerson and other officials declined to comment on when those products — or the SiGe-copper devices — would become widely available. [break] De San Francisco Gate heeft tevens een artikel over dit nieuws gepost: [/break] IBM is set to unveil a series of advances in chip design and materials that it said will keep ``Moore's law'' on the books for at least another decade.
[...] The technique is likely to appear in a year or two, he said, in specialized chips used in hubs and routers and for high-speed graphics, but later it will make its way into the processors used in desktop PCs. In 5 to 10 years, he said, it could make a possible a dramatic simplification in processor design, which in turn would cut costs and improve performance still further.
ik zie die postings van die zwartkijkers nog voor me: dak van huidige performance bijna bereikt, nou eat your bloody hearts out! We leven toch wel in een mooie tijd 
