Chipmakers Looking Beyond Silicon

We're used to computers becoming obsolete almost as soon as they leave the store because of rapid advances in chip technology, but the whole science of silicon chips is starting to show its age.

Industry leaders say it must be retired within 10 years and replaced with something better, if computer technology is to continue advancing at the current pace.

It's not clear what that new microprocessor technology will be, but some candidates are starting to emerge.

"We're at the stage now where we're sorting out the options," George Scalise, president of the Semiconductor Industry Association, said during a panel discussion Friday that gathered representatives of some of the industry's largest companies with their partners in the academic world.

It generally takes the computer industry about 10 years to move a technology from the laboratory to commercial applications, so the successor to current silicon microprocessors probably already has been shown to work -- somewhere -- on a small scale.

"We have all of these alternatives," said John Kelly, a senior vice president at IBM Corp.'s research division. "If we only had one, I'd be extremely worried."

One promising avenue is "spintronics," which looks at the "spin" status of electrons rather than their charge. The research is not quite as exotic as it sounds: Spin is related to magnetism and already is exploited by some memory chips.

Logic gates -- the basic building blocks of microprocessors -- that use spin technology can be made out of the same materials as current chips but consume very little power.

Increased power consumption -- and the waste heat it generates -- is a showstopping problem for current technology, said Professor Alain Kaloyeros of the College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering. The latest chips produce more heat per unit of area than old-fashioned steam irons do, he said.

"Given that we're not in the...