Samsung Barristor: a step forward for the chip in Graphene

The R & D Center Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology has announced it has developed a new transistor structure of graphene, so moving an important step in the reduction of physical limits are currently being faced in the construction of the silicon chip. The transistors are made of silicon because of the typical properties of this semiconductor material, in the last 40 years the industry has been able to optimize performance and efficiency by reducing the production process, but one has to think about the future because the physical limit was almost reached.

Since the graphene has an electron mobility of about 200 times greater than that of silicon, this material has been considered a worthy substitute. A problem, however they will remain vigilant scientists is that the graphene can not be turned off the current as it is a semi-metallic material which then would decrease the mobility of electrons.

Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology has developed a device, however, able to turn off the power to graphene without degrading their mobility. The device has been called Barristor and allowed Samsung to possess 9 patents relating to the structure of the operating method of the Barristor.

The institute has solved the problem so difficult in research on graphene and opened the door to new directions for future studies. This innovation continues to keep Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology leaders in related industries in this sector.

Intel introduced the latest powerful processor Xeon E5

Intel chose the SC11 conference as a platform for pre-release of a new generation of chips Xeon E5, which are designed for workstations and servers. Immediately after the presentation of the processor chips led the top ten running on supercomputers (according to Top 500), ahead of its competitors in performance more than doubled. In addition, the chip will be the first of a series of Xeon, equipped with a standard serial bus support for PCI Express 3.0, which doubles the throughput compared to the previous version (also PCI Express 3.0 has a high bandwidth when connecting to the Internet, and clusters of computers to local peripherals such as video cards).

Although the chips are already used to create a supercomputer, but, as stated by Intel, referring to the time required for the establishment of small workstations and servers, widespread Xeon E5 will be received in the first half of 2012. Also at the conference was represented by trial version of the processor Knights Corner, which may have more than 50 cores and provide record levels - more than one teraflop. Intel said that the finished version of the chip will be produced on 22 nm technology. While we do not know where to begin deliveries of Knights Corner, however, judging by the use of 22nm technology, large-scale output can be assigned to the year 2012.

So far, on a Mac Pro from Apple, as well as on workstations based on Xeon (which are mainly used in the corporate sector and in professional fields that require large computing power), in some cases used chips that did not get updated in 2010. Partly because of this kind of "stupor" from Intel, there were rumors about the production end Mac Pro and switch Apple on home PCs, such as the iMac .