Log in ....Tribune--Feature article

Monday, June 17, 2002		Article

TSMC's tiny transistor

TAIWAN Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC) said last week it had made a working microchip using a transistor one-tenth the size of those made with the most advanced production technology available.

TSMC, the world's largest contract chipmaker, said its breakthrough could potentially shrink transistors down to nine nanometers, or 1/10,000 the width of a human hair and pack the power of an entire supercomputer on the surface of a fingernail.

"TSMC's technologists have significantly expanded the outlook for the semiconductor industry," the company said in a statement.

While the company said it was confident the transistor would one day be produced commercially, it admitted that day may be a long way off.

Transistors create the "ones and zeroes" of computing by opening or shutting a gate to electrical current. Shrinking their size allows more computing power to be loaded into microchips but can also cause current to leak and make data unstable.

TSMC said it overcame this problem by putting two gates in the transistor to control leakage.

The new transistor could also allow chipmakers to continue to use current manufacturing processes called complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) for another two decades, eliminating the need to develop expensive new processes to boost computing power, TSMC said.

The new field effect transistor, or FET, was dubbed the FinFET as it looks like the back fin of a fish in three dimensions, and will be presented at an industry conference in Honolulu later. — Reuters

Domain key hidden to prevent govt meddling
Brendan Boyle

THE administrator of South Africa's Web addresses said he had hidden the key to the country's ".ZA" domain network abroad to prevent any government interference in access to the Internet.

South Africa's Parliament has given initial approval to a law that will allow the government to take control of the country's Internet address administration.

But critics, including ZA domain-name administrator Mike Lawrie, say the government has no right to stage the takeover and warn it could collapse the domestic Internet structure.

Lawrie, a South African Internet pioneer who is not paid for administrating the ZA domain, told Reuters he had taken pre-emptive action to stop the government from seizing control.

"The storage of the primary zone file that defines and controls the ZA namespace is now offshore," he said.

Lawrie said the zone file was 200 lines defining the structure of Internet sites and addresses ending in .ZA, which identifies the South African domain.

Lawrie said he had announced his action to signal to the global Internet community that the South African domain was secure despite the controversial legislation scheduled to pass its final parliamentary hurdle next week.

"If someone were to mistakenly corrupt the zone file in terms of trying to bulldoze their way in, they would not be able to do any damage," he said.

The new law is intended mainly to give legal status to Internet trades and contracts, but a section allows the state to take over domain name administration without consulting the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN).

The government says the domain structure cannot be left in the hands of an individual, but must be protected by the state.

Critics say the government is obsessed with control and is trying to nationalise its corner of the Internet.

ICANN is the international Internet address administrator