Potential applications include enabling smaller and lighter cellular phones with extended battery life. The technology also could be instrumental in packet voice and data transport over wireless phones, higher-speed Internet surfing and video applications, as well as digital audio broadcasts. The approach enables substantial reductions in cost, power consumption and size of integrated circuits. Lucent's one-volt DSP could be a key ingredient in SoC applications. The current DSP has gates that measure 0.25 micron, or roughly 400 times smaller than the width of a human hair.
Gates switch current on and off in transistors.
In the turbo-charged version, Bell Labs researchers Isik C. Kizilyalli and Pat Watson shrank the gates to 0.12 micron by refining the optical lithography approach used to produce various features on today's silicon chips. The novel phase-shifting approach modified how light passes through the mask, which is the master pattern for a silicon circuit, and improved resolution considerably. The researchers powered the modified DSP 1628 at two voltages. At 1.0 volt, it ran at 100 megahertz, and at 1.5 volts, it ran at 170 megahertz. The latter is nearly a three-fold improvement over the unmodified DSP 1628's performance of 60 megahertz at 1.5 volts.