Intel is working on a transistor design that could help the company's designers pack more memory onto its processors.
Company researchers plan to present a paper this week at the International Electron Devices Meeting in San Francisco outlining its work on "floating-body cell" transistors, said Mike Mayberry, director of components research with Intel's technology and manufacturing group. Simply put, the floating body cells could allow Intel to build processors with larger amounts of on-chip memory to boost performance, he said.
Mayberry's job is to come up with options for building ever-smaller transistors and keeping the performance train rolling well into the future. The floating-body cell idea is designed to improve the density of the cache memory that chip designers place on a processor.
Cache memory is used to store frequently accessed data directly on the chip, where it can be accessed much faster than data stored in system memory or on a hard drive. But SRAM (static RAM) cells currently used to make cache memory are not as dense as Intel would like, with six transistors needed to build a cell and store one bit of information.