Intel to renew its chips line with mass production of 3-D transistors, when?

Intel announced its plans to launch mass production of the world’s first 3-D microprocessor transistor.

“This transition to 3-D devices will help us continue Moore’s Law,” said Intel senior fellow Mark Bohr at the news conference Wednesday. “Clearly you can pack more things into a small space if you go vertical with 3-D.”

It is expected that in 2011 and 2012 Intel will shift its factories to new manufacture to put the Tri-Gate 3-D transistors onto a new line of Intel chips. Called as “Ivy Bridge,” the chips are the world’s first mass-produced 22-nanometer microprocessors.

The main difference of the 3-D transistors is in that instead of the power-conducting channel occurring on a 2-D surface as with existing transistors, it is replaced with a thin silicon fin that rises vertically from the silicon of the transistor.

Current control is then gated on each of the fin’s three sides on a 3-D transistor, rather than just on the top side, as happens in the current generation of planar, or 2-D, transistors.

“It’s the first change in transistor structure since 1958, when Robert Noyce invented the first planar IC,” said Dan Hutcheson, an analyst at VLSI Research. “Over the past 10 years, all we’ve done is shrink the chips. But it’s been growing more and more difficult to do so without actually changing the transistor itself.”

Besides, more transistors are able to be fit on the Ivy Bridge processors. According to Bohr the new chips have twice the transistor density of the previous generation of 32-nanometer chips.

When asked, company spokesmen wouldn’t say when we would see 3-D transistors in smartphones and tablets, but acknowledged the company has a date in mind.