IBM Eye

IBM has been in the news this week for announcing a breakthrough in High-k Metal Gate Technology. Though IBM was the lead, they partnered with AMD and others to share risk and expense. Intel singularly announced a similar breakthrough the same week. I’ve provided what I believe is a sufficiently detailed summary of the breakthrough (I’ve been summarily disappointed by every article I’ve read). If you’re interested in the physics or math of it all, Wikipedia is, as always, fantastic.

Background:

Moore’s law for processor speeds is in jeopardy because of limitations imposed by the use of Silicone Dioxide to insulate circuitry in microchips. One problem with SiO2 is that 5 atoms thick is as thin as they can get it, imposing a hard limit on how small the chips can get. The second problem is that at that width, noticeable current begins to seep out (technically “leakage currents due to tunneling” results), lots of heat builds up and lots of power is consumed. It has proven very difficult to find a suitable replacement material.

The Solution:

IBM et al found that certain hafnium http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hafnium alloys (probably Hafnium silicate - HfSiON) can be used as a more effective insulator than silicon dioxide and is planning to use the element to produce faster and more energy efficient chips, by allowing circuitry scaling to be reduced to less than 45 nanometers. Integrating high-k / metal gates will address the power consumption issue; a major barrier to scaling chips and continuing with Moore’s Law. It is thought that with this weeks announcements, Moore’s law has been extended through the next decade.

Another huge benefit to the Hafnium Solution is that it can be implemented without requiring major tooling or process changes in manufacturing. It seems that most of the alternative gate dielectric materials were impractical for existing manufacturing facilities resulting in potentially Billions of Dollars to move to the next generation of chip circuitry.

On-Topic Tangent:
Dr. Rajarao “Raj” Jammy was the project lead on this. He has 50+ patents and is one of those guys that you only ever see working in a University somewhere or at IBM. Anyway, there’s a great interview with here at Reed Electronics following a conference on High-k dielectrics. A quote:

…(In) reference to SiO2 or silicon oxide or silicon oxynitride gates, those gates with polysilicon electrodes have stopped scaling. So once these dielectric stacks or gate stacks have stopped scaling, we really had no option left. But for performance enhancement, people continue to use new ideas, like mobility enhancement. And therefore, they continue the scaling that the industry is so used to. But in some point in time we have to get back to the dielectric and try to see how we can continue to scale the dielectric also – part of it for the improvement in the coupling that we achieve at the channel, and therefore drive more current; but also the key part of it is reducing the leakage that comes from the gate dielectric.

Avinash Kaushik of Occam’s Razor speaks with Mike Moran, the new Product Manager for IBM’s OmniFind search product, about Search Engine Optimization. (link: http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/2006/12/ten-minutes-with-mike-moran-ibm.html ). The interview is great. I don’t know that you’ll learn much about IBM strategically, but it’s interesting to me. A couple of no nonsense points that IBM’s “Distinguished Engineer” makes:

If you don’t want to take advantage of the lowest-cost way of increasing traffic to your site (organic search), then you really aren’t serious about your Web site.

Research shows that companies that show up in both the organic and paid results for a search get as much as seven times the clickthrough received for either one alone.

The most important thing to know about search marketing is that it is more about marketing than search. You need to know the purpose of your Web site, you need to measure how effective it is at driving conversions, and you must know the value of those conversions so you can know how much effort and expense you should devote to search marketing… If you don’t know how much it is worth to drive an extra visitor to your site, how do you know how much to spend doing it? If you don’t know the return on your search investment, how do you know when you should start spending money on something else?

Rankings, referrals, and conversions are the three most important (KPI’s).

Start with marketing, not with search. Know the business purpose of your site, design it to fulfill that purpose, measure its success, and experiment with improvements every day.

Every person that touches your Web site must know that SEO is part of their job.

IBM has purchased Internet Security Systems Inc. (ISSX), an IBM partner since 1999, for $1.3 Billion.  ISS started in 1994 with one product, Internet Scanner, and has grown to a suite of security offerings including the ISS X-Force Intelligence Service credited with discovering a number of Microsoft security vulnerabilities in recent months.  This is IBM’s forth acquisition this month, and its 5th largest of all time, but hey, who’s counting.

Kristof Kloeckner, vice president of strategy and technology for IBM’s software group, was interviewed about the purchase by the Washington Post. 

He said, “We have enough freedom to do whatever is required to strengthen our business. We do not feel constrained”.  I think in this case someone should have constrained him.

From where I sit here in the cheap seats, it looks as though IBM has made its first bad acquisition of the year.  (more…)

IBM’s newly promoted VP of Brand and Values Experience, Lee Green, talks to Business Week about the evolving role of design within the company:

Design has been a cornerstone of IBM’s offerings and of high importance to the corporation for decades. As a result, we’ve developed an internal capability that is highly skilled and highly diverse.

As IBM’s strategy has changed, and we’ve moved towards consulting and services, and away from our commodity offerings, we realized that this was a skill that could be of value to them. What they found most appealing, and what differentiates us from other industrial design firms, is the link between our design talent and world-class technology. When a client brings us in to talk about next-generation innovation, we bring design expertise, we bring connection to our research partners, we have information on emerging technologies, et cetera.

Full article: Big Blue’s Design Guru Moves Up

In a recent Business Week interview, Sam Palmisano talks about the results of IBM’s global CEO survey and offers his personal take on why CEO’s feel they have to personally lead their companies’ innovation efforts:

Go back even 10 years ago. Was it natural for IBM to go collaborate around the future of innovation or the future of our technologies? Was it natural for us to open up to the world the things we solved technically as we were inventing things to get feedback on where that was going? Was it natural for IBM to join into the open-source community to talk about standards around lots of technologies? These weren’t natural things to occur. The CEO has to give permission to the organization to have it happen.

Read the full article: Innovation: The View From The Top

The Taking Notes Podcast published a podcast interview with IBM Domino executive Ed Brill.

To download the podcast: Taking Notes Episode 16: 03.02.06 - Interview with Ed Brill

Social-network analysis has the potential to uncover the informal networks that exist in an organisation and can help to explain and understand the mechanisms used to collaborate, innovate and even simply working out what makes an organisation “tick”.

IBM researcher Kate Ehrlich, part of the On Demand Innovation Services (ODIS) group of IBM spoke with Business Week about the role of social networks in an organisation.

Read the full article: IBM: Untangling Office Connections

Luis Suarez writes an analysis of the interview on his own blog: IBM: Untangling Office Connections

IBM has announced a new series of podcasts on intellectual property: “The New Intellectual Property (IP) Marketplace”.

The initial podcast discusses the characteristics of the IP marketplace, examining the importance of quality in patents and innovation through sharing ideas. The podcast features Irving Wladawsky-Berger, IBM vice president of technology strategy and innovation.

You can download the podcast at IBM Podcast: The New Intellectual Property Marketplace

Future topics will include open source as prior art for US patent applications, broadening community review capabilities, adding certainty to the patent process and a discussion on the upcoming patent quality index.

See the full press release: IBM to Launch Intellectual Property Podcast Series

John Simonds interviews his colleague, Tom Morrissey about their group, IBM Analyst Relations.

Tom is “… an Analyst Relations professional in IBM’s Software Group, focused mainly on IBM solutions for the SMB market”, and his job is “… to brief and consult with Analyst Firms on IBM’s portfolio of Express offerings for our Business Partners serving mid-market customers.

Read the full interview at Delusions of Adequacy: IBM Analyst Relations, Who are we? - Tom Morrissey

InternetNews.com published an interview with Ambuj Goyal about IBM’s information-as-a-service strategy.

Clint Boulton writes, “From afar, IBM’s purchases of entity analytics player SRD Software, portal connector Bowstreet and a raft of other small software companies might reek of a company plugging cavities with high-tech fillings. But look closely and you can see the buys as part of IBM’s master plan to corral the nascent information-as-a-service market. The man behind the master plan is Ambuj Goyal, who took the helm of IBM’s information management division in August. His job is to steer IBM in waters few others are testing: absorbing data, cleansing it and rendering it as valuable information.”

Ambuj headed up IBM’s Lotus division until late last year when he moved over to the Information Management division.

Read the full article at InternewNews.com: Ambuj Goyal, GM, IBM Information Management