In a surprise announcement described as the "biggest change to computer chips in 40 years," Intel (Santa Clara, Calif.) said it has committed to putting hafnium-based high-k gate dielectrics and metal gate electrodes into production for the 45 nm generation. Intel's announcement was quickly followed by a similar one from IBM (Yorktown Heights, N.Y.). The two advantages of a high-k gate dielectric over the silicon oxynitride now used are reduced gate leakage and increased drive current. It also enables future scaling, since conventional dielectrics are already critically thin, measuring only ～5 atoms thick. It's estimated the almost half of a chip's power consumption is due to current leakage through this thin dielectric.
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