IBM 1997 Annual Report Download - page 21

PART OF THE FUN IN THE
INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY INDUSTRY IS WAITING
FOR THE NEXT METEOR —the hot startup that rockets
from obscurity behind a new piece of hardware or
some hot software. They’re fun to watch, and you can
sometimes observe their entire life cycle before the
seasons change. It takes a bit more patience to track
solutions to the industry’s biggest challenges — in
artificial intelligence, materials science, mathematics,
complex algorithms for language recognition. These
are challenges only the deepest, most committed,
talented and, yes, stubborn teams take on.
For nearly 30 years, the entire semiconductor
industry looked for ways to gain the perfor-
mance advantages of using copper (which conducts
electricity 40 percent faster than aluminum) in
the tiny, tiny wires inside computer microchips.
Last fall, IBM scientists won the race — if a genera-
tion-long journey can be called that. Perhaps just
as astounding was our schedule to bring copper
chips from the lab into production and to the
market by this summer.
With this breakthrough, semiconductor devices
like microprocessors and memory chips can be made
more powerful, less expensive, smaller and more
energy efficient.
Only a handful of companies have the staying
power to lay siege to challenges like this one. Only
one could turn the solution into overnight success.
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Hundreds of PowerPC microprocessors
are etched into this silicon wafer, which
incorporates IBM’s patented copper
circuitry technology.