On Wed, 08 Feb 2006 16:54:09 -0600, Jon Elson wrote:

No, this has nothing to do with cooling. It uses certain metals or alloys
to impart mechanical stresses in the silicon that form the conductive
channels, I think, of the transistors. They need compressive stress in
the N channel and tensile stress in the P channel (or maybe I have that
reversed).

Do I recall something about quantum effects in very thin
conductors having an effect on resistance?

it gets around the problem of leakage current in the transistors
when the lithographic process is shrunk, with has been the big stumbling
block in continuing the progress in performance of digital chips for the
next generation beyond 90 nm feature size.

That would be trace to trace, right?
--
Cliff