Supplies of new chip metal hafnium remain untested

By Carole Vaporean

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Hafnium was unknown to nearly everyone but a handful of scientists and engineers until late January, when Intel Corp. and IBM announced their faster, more efficient microprocessors would be constructed using the silvery metal.

Yet the stable and benign element listed at No. 72 on the periodic chart accounts for the breakthrough to the next generation of semiconductor. Chipmakers eventually plan to install it in everything from servers to cellphones.

Once the rare element becomes so pervasive, however, is there danger of supply shortages?

The question drew laughter from those in the know. Not from ridicule, but because the minuscule amounts used in even billions of transistors boggles the imagination.

"Even if you took all the hafnium on a 12-inch (chip) wafer you'd be hard pressed to see it with the human eye," said Jim McGregor, analyst at technology research organization In-Stat.

Hafnium oxide will replace the layer of silicon oxide in tiny transistors or microprocessors that go into a chip. One chip requires hundreds of millions or even billions of them.

IBM Chief Technologist Bernard Meyerson put the supply situation in greater perspective: the hafnium in a cubic centimeter, the size of a small sugar cube, could be spread across 10 U.S. football fields worth of silicon wafers used to make chips.

"That assumes a 50-atom-high pile of it," said Meyerson, "which frankly would be an extraordinarily large amount for materials like this one. That amount will go down over time."

The material layered into transistors is alloy hafnium oxide, which means pure hafnium would stretch even further.

When working on such a minute scale, electricity tends to leak out of transistor circuits, resulting in power loss, and the silicon oxide material that hafnium replaces also leaks power. The new hafnium chips help reduce that power loss and

lets chipmakers create ever smaller processors.

"The advantage of a small processor is it's faster and lower power, meaning your battery life will be longer," said Professor Tso-Ping Ma, chairman of electrical engineering at Yale University and a 10-year researcher on the new chips.

"You won't need to recharge your cellphone or Blackberry or laptop as often. If you can lengthen the battery life by a factor of two, that is tremendous. And that's what this thing does," he added.

The hafnium-based semiconductor runs 20 percent faster, Ma said, and reduced leakage will mean five times the power savings.

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