AMD is planning to premier a number of technological achievements at this year's International Electron Devices Meeting, which began in San Francisco yesterday.

In the first of three major presentations, AMD will advocate a possible future alternative to the present "planar" transistors called Fin Field Effect Transistors.

In the second, it will outline what research work the company has done into building transistors which are made not from polysilicon but from metal. This new nickel-based gate technology could drastically improve the performance of transistors by improving electrical current flow. AMD believes that transistors of this type could be the new industry standard by 2005.

And in the third, AMD will discuss its work with Stanford University with new Flash memory cell structures.

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Wow, way to go AMD! Just when you think AMD is losing ground, they hit right back with innovation after innovation... Wheres Intel and their new innovations?? huh? HUH????

Hyper Threading, Mo.

Ok, but thats not as big as the inovations AMD has just done. Tell me which will help further increase the quality and performance of future computers more? I knew you would say AMD. HT is good, but its only good for Intel cpus, not for the whole industry.

That is very interesting. Using a metal as the base of a semiconductor device. I'm sure they had a tough time along the way with that. the reason that silicon is used is because it can be doped(usually with arsenic) so it is capable of conducting, only after it is biased. Germanium is also used in some devices but is not as stable as silicon. It takes .7v to bias a silicon device and .3 to bias a germanium device. The problem is that the germanium device is more easily saturated and becomes very unstable. Seems that if they have found a way to use a metal as the basis for a transistor, they should be able to get a lower bias voltage. If they have found a way to keep the device from becoming a short circuit(that was one of the problems in the past with trying to use metals.

Yeah, AMD is the bigger innovation definitely. Hyper Threading still is an innovation though...big, too...

I doubt AMD won't file for a patent or something...but, "new industry standard" kind of throws me off.

They should, if they want to keep up with Intel.

You are thinking too small Veh, The FFET will have many uses. Computers being only a small slice of the pie. This is a huge innovation in electronics in general, not only in the computing industry.