By Sung Il Moon
YDN Staff Reporter
In a promising partnership between academe and the business world, Motorola, International Business Machines, and Texas Instruments will all work with Yale's electrical engineering department to find new ways to develop the next generation of computer chips.
These technology giants are only a sample of the many businesses interested in transforming Yale professors' research into new products. And many companies spanning the globe are seeking the expertise of Professor Tso-Ping Ma, who specializes in the construction of semiconductors. The foundation of microchips, semiconductors are essential in building computers.
Ma's research holds special interest for America's leading computer-makers because he has made a breakthrough discovery in constructing the next generation of semiconductors.
"We have to look ahead," Ma said. "We have to anticipate the need 10 years from now."
Ma expects that within ten years, the current technology used to make computer chips will be obsolete due to physical limitations. While semiconductor devices have been becoming faster at an exponential rate, this efficiency gain has been made by a process known as scaling.
When engineers scale a chip they are essentially cramming more transistors into smaller space. Eventually, the chips will become so crowded that researchers will no longer be able to add anymore components. When scientists reach this point, they will no longer be able to build faster chips with the existing technology.
As a result, corporations like IBM are desperate to find new ways to break this barrier and satisfy the ever-growing demand for faster computers.
So far, Ma is the only person in the world who has actually broken down this technological wall.
"IBM, TI, Motorola, Intel -- you name it, they all come to us," Ma said.
Surprisingly, Ma's approach to solving the scaling problem is more scaling. The twist is that Ma has found a new material with which to build semiconductors.
The new material, silicon nitride, is thinner than what Intel uses today to build its Pentium II chips. This material might allow the U.S. computer industry to continue using the scaling technology to make new computers.
Ma has actually built semiconductor devices with the new material, but like all new technology, the process remains costly.