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IBM Creates New Processor Production Method
Vandermar writes: "IBM's new production method uses an advanced insulation material -- a low-k dielectric -- that protects the millions of individual copper circuits on a chip." Apparently it works at sizes down to 0.13 micron and the insulation itself is primarily silk. IBM says it will be using this technology for its Power 4 processor, but with their technology sharing with Transmeta and AMD can we expect to see this enhancement in their chips?"
what, didnt you do that elementary school experiment where you rub your hard rubber rod with a piece of silk?
note to taco: Why don't you make posting without a bonus point the default and give us a checkbox for adding it, since according to the moderator guidelines we're supposed to use it sparingly.
Tower, hope you check your user page for replies (and not just to see if your kama has gone up or down :-). Most of the moderators are decent people but as with any other community there are some that are on either too much or too little medication and some that are just plain jerks.
Apparently, there are also a discouraging number that don't understand the meaning of the word "redundant".
Maybe we should post with the bonus all the time to draw the fire of the "attack" moderators to protect other posters (karma's for burning, right?).
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
If you go back to the first comment and my reply, you'll see that someone has, over 48 hours after it was posted, moderated my reply down as offtopic, even though it was directly related to the content of the first post. I'm pretty sure now that it's an organized effort. Whoever they are, they seem to strike about once every 10 to 14 days. From some things I've read elsewhere I'm pretty sure several others are being targeted as well.
The funny thing is, about a month ago, after my karma had been sitting at 12 for probably half a year, with me not particularly worried about it one way or another, only checked my user page frequently looking for replies, I got up to about 16 over the course of 3 or 4 days off of a few posts. Then within 2 days the "attack moderators" had me back down to 12, and I got annoyed enough to sink to their level and got busy, posting often, and, despite one temporary setback a couple of weeks ago, I'm now high enough up the karma scale to be able to spare plenty.
I'm thinking of discontinuing playing the game and scaling back my efforts in order to qualify to moderate again.
The trouble with getting older is that being juvenile becomes wearying, especially with problems in the real world that actually matter to deal with.
note to all the sig nazis: I'm posting this without checking the box that prevents the extra point from being added so this post will show up as a +2 instead of my usual +1.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
But one has to wonder why the article says "silk" and not "SiLK®" or at least "SiLK[tm]". Even after reading the sentence "IBM has developed a proprietary technique to build chips using silk, a low-k dielectric material that is commercially available from the Dow Chemical Co.," I still wasn't positive that they weren't talking about the stuff from silkworms. Nowhere in the article do they actually say the "silk" they're talking about is not what people normally mean when they say "silk". I mean, just because it's "commercially available from the Dow Chemical Co." that doesn't mean it can't come from a worm's butt.
That said, you're right that they don't mean stuff from a worm's butt. You can't conclusively determine that just from reading the article though, so nyah.
I gotta admit, I haven't read the article yet, but plain jane silk certainly isn't the most durable substance on earth.
Read the article. This is a low-K dielectric with the trade name "SILK" (probably an acronym).
silk the sexy material was not mentioned in the press release. SiLK the dialectric was mentioned in the press release.
.13u. The reason the press release mentioned .13u was IBM happened to also happened to announce a .13u chip the same day. Not related (but equally cool).
Also, the new techique for applying SiLK works ostensibly at any manufacturing size, not just
Here's the non-Yahoo link:
http://www.chips.ibm.com/news/200 0/0403_lowk.html
I don't remember hearing about any agreement between IBM and AMD. This technology is intellectual property of IBM and would not be available to anyone unless IBM decides more can be obtain from licensing the process. The rumored talks between Motorola and AMD wouldn't necessarily benefit from this development because, while the two are part of the AIM PPC alliance they don't share much in the way of manufacturing processes. Sounds like good news to the PPC camp though.
-Jon
The truth will set you free.
Silk. As in the threadlike material that comes from silkworm bottoms.
I had absolutely no idea that silk had applications to electronics. Go figure.
"If ignorance is bliss, may I never be happy.
-- Veni, vidi, dormivi
Licensing patents on stuff like this is IBM's usual MO, so yeah, they probably will start licensing it to all comers.
It wouldn't make sense for IBM not to license the technology, for we all know that in this fast-paced industry, holding on to patent rights rather than licensing them tends to not give you a competitve advantage for very long. Someone will come along and invent something similar, but not infringeing before long...
My journal has hot
Science News had a really good article about the pursuit of new insulators for use in semiconductors last week.
Tell that to the silkworm. He's still being exploited.
IBM says the Internet is important. We need faster machines 'cause the Internet is too slow. We just might license this technology to other vendors so that they can help speed up the Internet...'cause the Internet is important. We also have some new paper manufacturing techologies. This is important 'cause people need to print things they find on the Internet. Did we happen to mention that the Internet is important?
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
Unfortunately, someone modded you down for what I consider to be an opinion issue.
;)
Not all information wants to be free. Especially when it comes to microprocessor design. Code is one thing, which, by and large, can be created in one's basement with little overhead. Microprocessors, on the other hand, are designed and built with one thing in mind, to make money. Producing microprocessors is outrageously expensive and therefore, any technique that will enhance the quality of those processors is worth quite a good deal of money to those producing microprocessors.
Even if the information was free, it wouldn't do any of us Slashdotters any good. Unless of course one of us has a couple of million dollars to drop on turning our basement into a clean room full of silicon etching equipment.
I believe this is just IBM's SOI (silicon on insulator) technology, though I could be wrong. This technology is already being used in the G3 chips being used in Powerbooks, if I remember correctly.
Yes, IBM was, and still is manufacturing PowerPC chips. The PowerPC archetecture is owned by the AIM (Apple-IBM-Motorola) consordium and is based off of the older IBM POWER archetecture. There was a split over the inclusion of Altivec, which is Motorola's technology to help to DSP in embedded devices and personal computers, but IBM continues to make high-end server chips.
There will probably never be a Macintosh that uses the POWER4 chip, though. The POWER4 is a 64-bit PowerPC implemenation intended for high-end IBM servers. It is not meant to go in a Mac. The 500 MHz memory bus and matching RAM alone would drive the price of a Mac far beyond consumer's reach. It will also not include Altivec, which Apple is betting heavily on. We will likely as not be stuck behind x86 chips in power for awhile unless Motorola can get off their duff and fix the PPC 7400 production problems or get a newer, better chip out the door.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
The whole interconnect / gate speed thing has been a cycle, and probably will continue to be (though it's getting to be more and more interconnect lately). You architect a system - all is good, and you are usually held back by your logic, not your wires. You respin your chip a few times, ramping up the clock speed with new technology, until your wires get in the way... uh-oh! Time to fix a few things an re-release this one (think P-II/III)...
The newer the design, the better you can take advantage of all of the new technologies, and really gain the most... you have total control over your wiring, and most of your paths. If you need to stay fully compatable with a previous chip, and want to retain as much of the logic as possible (finally got that pesky FP thing working right), then you are going to suffer in how far you can take things.
There's tons of overhead in a full redesign (person-years, dev costs, etc) - look at AMD with the Athlon (maintaining compatability, but redesigning most of the internals), but look at the gains in clock speed (more complicated in many areas than the P-lines, but easier to ramp up).
There's quicker cheaper fixes, but they don't buy you as much at one time - here we have the PPro/PII/P!!!/P!!! Coppermine...... re-optimize a little bit and you get a good MHz percentage increase... but you have to make these changes more often. (there are changes to be made with any chip that needs to ramp up the clock - even the Athlon, though as of now, a lot of that can be attributed to process rather than design - a good place to be).
The Merced (aka Itanium, aka PA-Risc w/IA-64) is a good step at breaking out of a rapidly dying ISA (though Willamette shows some promise at extending the life of this storied line even further), but the delays there have really soured some people on it, and many are looking at the next generation Alphas and the next POWER chips from IBM (and PowerPC line, of course). There's a lot of good 64 bit solutions out there, and there's no doubt we should continue to push forward, but I'm doubting that Iced/Mertaium will get to market in time for its performance point...
oh well...
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
I always check for replies (my karma level is happy enough to be irrelevant most of the time, though I am hurt to see my posts at 0 8^D)...
;-)
I've suggested the reverse option for the +1 bonus myself... not sure if things have fallen on deaf ears, or if somebody really has a good reason. I agree with most moderation (I don't find nearly as many items to mark 'unfair' in M2 as there used to be), but every once in a while, somebody gets targeted (I had a lot of AC flames that same week for karma whoring (what a surprise))... Started to feel like Sig, Enoch, et. al.... Probably just pissed somebody off with one of my comments 8^)
Moderation is a Good Thing, though... it's been very helpful (haven't seen a ninja/natalie/ascii art/smut story post in a while (except when somebody mods them up as "funny", which is pretty unusual).
I think that *is* the smell of burning karma
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
Has anyone ever noticed that Intel's commercials about how super fast their machines are really show slow systems? I don't know about you guys but when I watch these commercials I don't really see anything especially dazzling about their system performance! Who hasn't seen a video running on their computer, regardless of CPU? Who hasn't seen 3D graphics? Hell, the 3D stuff they show looks pretty much like any other computer I've ever seen, and we're talking about low-end systems. If they want to showcase real-world speed (instead of wild panoramic camera angles in space or whatever Intel does which has nothing to do with actual desktop system performance), they need to shoot stuff like old Apple commercials. Apple used to swing the camera around to a PowerMac monitor where all kinds of windows/video/content/gfx were flying around like a cyberflick on steroids. Oh, and you guys notice the @Home cable modem commercials on TV? Yes, the Internet sure is quick but when they show a video on the monitor in the commercial it looks like 5fps crap! Why do marketing guys let this stuff get by? Did they want it slow to make it look "computerized?" Is their marketing hardware supposed to look slow on TV or is that how sluggish the stuff is? Sorry if I sound arrogant; I'm on a G4/500 =)
-----
Linux user: if (nt == unstable) { switchTo.linux() }
Those who laugh at you for you having a Mac.. are the people who constantly call you to fix their PC.
Yet again we see the results of the IBM investment in basic research, especially in regards to copper for circuitry.
What are the impacts? It's not so much the smaller processor or the faster speeds - it's the lower power consumption that will cause the most dramatic change. That plus the lower cost to manufacture.
Will in Seattle
2000-04-03 13:47:25 IBM's plan to make 30% faster chips (articles,ibm) (declined)
/.'s sorting of story postings?
I posted this article with the link to the press release yesterday at 1 pm EST. WTF is wrong with
Hemos, I'm glad you picked the story, but if I were you, I'd look to see who's sorting your submissions.
of course, the cynic in me says the companies would just absorb any savings as profit. :)
I am a man of const int sorrows
silk, a low-k dielectric material that is commercially available from the Dow Chemical Co.
Proposed New Slashdot slogan: Read First, Post Later
--www.mp3.com/kruhft--
That's pretty much my impression of the Slashdot community. A good majority of you guys consistently fail to see the big picture and instead choose to find faults in the articles or what other people have said.
As I scroll down the list of posts, I see the occasional post that actually discusses the issue at hand, but the majority of them are composed of arguments between two people or maybe a relevant discussion of how to pronouce "Linux." I suppose I could set my threshold level higher, but then I only can see what others think is worth reading.
As an aside, I'm in the Computer Engineering program here at MSOE, and I see the same traits in my CD classmates. A good portion of them, while being intelligent people, can only focus on the small details at hand, rather than being concerned with the grand scheme of things, which is usually the more important thing to be concerned with.
David Peters
I think a big question here is, does this impact Apple? With Motorola holding up the release of faster G4 processers, etc, and with IBM just coming up with blazing technology such as this, where does Apple fit in? Obviously, if Motorola had it's act together, this IBM announcement would be awesome news for Apple, but now, it doesn't do a whole lot of good for Mac users.
One possible problem is poor heat conduction from die to package, but the tradeoff is probably worth it.
Non issue. IC dice mount with the back of the die, not the active side, to the substrate. Even flip-chip (solder-bump) parts have to use a thermal contact on the other side for all but the lowest power dissipations because the total contact area on the metalized side must be a small percentage of the total.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
Basicly delay is proportional to R*C - the resistance of the wire times the capacitance of it. You can reduce the resistance by using a more conductive metal (like Cu rather than the more traditional Al). You can reduce the capacitance by:
- reducing the wire's area (but 'edge effects' - proportional to the length of the wire don't scale in the same way as other features so this is becoming problematical)
- moving the wire further away from other wires (but we're trying to make things smaller to fit more stuff in, not bigger)
- use an insulator between the wires with a lower dieletric constant (what's happening here)
5 years ago we designers didn't care much about wire delays - they weren't what made our logic slow - now they're killing usPS: Intel's 'coppermine' processers don't use copper wires - marketting is everything ....
If the technique is proven viable, IBM will surely get their patents in a row and start licensing the technology to all comers. Just because they have tech sharing with Transmeta and AMD doesn't mean that Intel, Motorola and Via are not going to be able to get their hands on this. IBM's revenues are not solely from hardware sales, and certainly not from chip sales alone. It is in IBM's best interest to license the patents out to whomever will pay for them.
So, on that note, I do believe that Transmeta and AMD will end up with this technology, assuming it is useful.
From http://www.dow.com/dow_news/co rporate/20000403a.html:
The Dow Chemical Company is supplying IBM with SiLK* semiconductor dielectric resin
This is an artificial polymer with a low dielectric constant. Not the silk used for cloth.
The article also gives a moderately technical description of why a low-k dielectric is a Good Thing.
The industry's been working on low-k dielectrics
for a long time.
The real issue with low-k dielectrics is that they
reduce the capacitance of the onchip wiring.
This has several benefits:
1) Wiring capacitances in general will be
signficantly reduced.
2) Wires running parallel to each other will
have less crosstalk. I.e., if the voltage on
one wire switches, it'll have less tendency to
drag the voltage of wires close to it with it.
This is a result of neighboring wires having
mutual capacitance. --> EASIER DESIGN
3) Since capacitances are reduced, less power
will be needed to cause metal wires to switch
voltage. --> COOLER CPUs, -->LOWER POWER
4) Because of the reduced capacitances, it requires less current to switch wires.
--> FASTER CPUs.
This is a really significant advance by IBM,
maybe more signficant than copper metallization.
One possible problem is poor heat conduction
from die to package, but the tradeoff is probably
worth it.