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0.01 Micron Process?
hypo writes "According to a recent ZDNet article, IBM is developing a technique called "V-Groove", that allows the channel lengths of transistors on chips to be 10 nanometers (0.01 micron) and below. Currently, most companies use a 0.18 micron or 180 nanometer process. This is certainly a giant leap. The only caveat is that IBM is not planning to use this in large chips (i.e., processors) for 10 to 15 years. However, this is still quite revolutionary because most people thought that a 0.02 process would be the fundamental minimum. This all shows that Moore's law can perhaps hold true in the future. This article also discusses Carbon Nanotubes, which might research market faster than experts had previously thought."
Someone please correct me if I'm wrong (I certainly might be.. I'm not intimately familar with microelectronics engineering), but I thought what we currently associate with chip die processes are the trace widths, not the channel length.
Trace width is the width of the conductors connecting different transisitors on the chip. This is important because a smaller trace width means that the whole chip is scaled down, including the spaces between the traces. This raises capacitance between parallel wires and causes the posibility of cross-talk.
As for channel length, the article says:
Channel length represents the distance electricity needs to travel through a transistor, shorter transistors lessen the distance traveled, delivering greater performance.
While this is related to performance (specificly, switching timings), I am not sure if it is related to trace width at all. The ZDNet article may be mistakenly associating the two.
Also, I think that one may be able to vary the trace width and the channel lengths independently. If that is the case, we may have performance increases from channel lengths even if we hit a wall when it comes to trace widths.
Can someone with some microelectronic background clarify these issues?
Thanks.
Using your sig line to advertise for friends is lame.
What if you turn off optimisations on your C++ compiler? I know that VC++ does a good ammount of stuff toward the end of speeding up its output (it optimizes much better than C++Builder, for instance)
:)
Doesn't matter. Object Pascal compiles 10-100 times faster than Visual C++ with all optimizations turned off. The speed comes from a few places:
1. C++ programs tend to be idiotic with the include files. A 10,000 program may include 500,000 lines of includes. Object Pascal has a much nicer module system.
2. Object Pascal has a much cleaner syntax than C++ and doesn't need a preprocessing step.
3. The Object Pascal compiler is a very nice piece of programming
There's also a marketing issue -- As a company, you want to keep one step ahead of the competition. You also want to get the biggest bang for your research buck. If you get too far ahead of the competition, you won't be able to use, and make money off of, some of your other research. It's also nice to have an 'ace in the hole' for when they threaten to overtake you in another area.
Finally there's the simple lead time for going from producing a .01Micron straight line to producing a 100-million transister CPU from said technology -- and doing it in good quantity with high reliability.
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That having been said, I remember a story from a Nortern Telecom tech about the (relatively) early days of optical fiber. One of the labs claimed to have produced a really high-caliber optical repeater laser (about the size of a large grain of sugar). The production of the units was fobbed off on a Japanese company because the company big-wigs didn't believe lab staff that it could be done well using local resources.
Well the Japanese company messed up the order, (they weren't sensitive enough -- a prime specification) and the Exec turned to the lab and essentially said 'we need that order NOW -- Please do it with the lab equipment (no time to build a fab facility at this point).
Well, the lab made such high quality units that they were TOO sensitive. They were reacting to noise from the other electronics (which wasn't expecting such high quality in the repeater laser). Rather than re-design the electronics they went back to the lab and asked them to purposefully crank down the sensitivity of the lasRs.
Moral of the story: If IBM really HAD to get that stuff out the door in 18 months they could proabably do so. Chances are, however, that they can't see the long-term financial benefit of doing so.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
Technical matters aside, I guess that'd be like releasing your sophmore album when everyone is still grooving to the first one. I think people have a limit - a measurable one - to how quickly they'll bounce to the Next Best Thing.
So what I'm saying is there might very well be market disincentives for doing such things. IANAE (I Am Not An Economist) and I can't prove it, just taking a wild swing.
.02
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My
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www.crashspace.net
I work for a silicon wafer manufacturer, we supply Intel, AMD, etc with the wafers that they put the chips onto.
.13 micron. The human eye can only see down to .30 microns or so. (That's under ideal conditions, dark room, 200 watt halogen light focused on the wafer.) Needless to say there has been a transition to machine only inspection as the chip lines widths have gotten smaller.
.13 micron line widths makes me wonder what the yields will be like. The machines that can see down to .13 micron run about 1/2 million or so. I haven't seen what the next generation of them will do, but I know that we don't have them installed in our plant yet. That is definately one reason why it takes so long for this stuff to reach consumers. The clean rooms that the wafers are cleaned and inspected in are filtered down to class 10, which translates to less than 10 particles in the air at .3 microns. We usually have 0-1 at .1 microns. Makes an operating room look positively filthy.
The wafers we supply have and 'Epi' layer on them, which is short for epitaxial. The layer is silicon that is grown on the wafer at a high tempurature (I think 950-1000 degrees C). This makes the wafers less rough, thus smaller lines widths. The wafers are inspected for defects, and the machines that inspect them can only see particles, pits, etc down to
Intel already annoucing the
The wafer manufacturers are mostly breaking even at this point. Intel is making fat cash, but they are getting it from squeezing all the wafer suppliers. Some have dropped out of the business do to the lean conditions. Nobody really has enough money to buy equipment to make these wafers on a large scale, let only finding vendors that have equipment that meets those specs.
.01 micron, holy crap!
If this is to be a point on the Moore's law curve it will have to be in production in just over 6 years.
Can't have it both ways. Either it (or something of equivalent density) is out then or Moore's law finally breaks down.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
The problem with this and all new tech is cost. Right now, AFAIK the real research is going into .07 micron tech (you say .18, but actually .13 is "cutting edge"). Currently .07 is done using a laser etch, as opposed to lithography. For any new tech to become available you have to be able to mass produce it, and do so cheaply. .07 isn't cost effective yet (because of the laser it takes a long time to produce one wafer), and I would guess that .01 is not cost effective either. the next 10-15 years will likely see IBM first perfecting the process, and then scaling it to large scale/mass production. After that you may see things (5-10 years) being created using this process, but I wouldn't expect anything, even larger feature sizes, to be seen before then.
From first proof of concept to a commercialy viable product is often very very long. Such as:
Liquid fuel rockets - 1920's
Turbojet - mid 1930's
TV - 1920-something
High temp superconductor 1992?
Digital electronic computer - 1945
They haven't even made a chip yet! They have just made a transistor or two.
It is not even clear from the article how small they have gotten the channels: it only says that the technique "scales to" 10nm.
There is a long way from showing that a given technology will sort-of-work in a lab to mass-production. That's one of the reasons for the delay.
Another is that there might not be a market. It is currently quite feasible to get a couple of ~1GHz processors with a few gigs of RAM in a machin we can almost afford. Let's face it: few of us sitting here reading Slashdot are using our quad-Xeon workstations to their fullest. Who would really buy it at, say, 100 times the current price? I've just ordered my dual-PIII and I doubt I could easily use more processor speed. (Memory, maybe.) And I'm sure I wouldn't pay half a million bucks for it!
Hi!
I have one question here: will software really need more and more CPU performance as time goes by?
I mean, as the article says, sure, servers and stuff will definitely put good use to the increase in performance, but what about good ol' Joe Sixpack using Excel at his office? I mean, besides from cranking SETI@home units faster, is there really such a need for faster processors at home / office?
In all honestly, I stopped noticing any speed differences around 200MHz or so. I used a 200MHz Pentium running Win NT for a while at work, then I went to a 400MHz Pentium II. Couldn't tell the difference at all.
It is getting to where rewriting software and/or changing your approach are much more valuable than processor pissing contests. When I compile code with Visual C++ it seems to take forever, given a large project. If I use Object Pascal instead, the compilation time drops by 2-3 orders of magnitude. That's a much bigger win than increasing my machine to a 2GHz processor.
I would worry the salmon chip trying to swim upstream to spawn. The worst we have to feer from the V-Groove is some funkadelic dancing.
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/bin/fortune | slashdotsig.sh
Maybe with this tech 3dfx can make a voodoo5 small enough to fit inside my computer case.. :)
Ahem, a law can not be both accurate and in need of revision within its (original) domain.
Hi!
This is yet another "I've always wondered...." question I have for all you Slashdot readers.
When we see stories about quantum leaps in computer technology, why are companies so slow to actually produce, implement, and sell it?
I feel releasing this technology now would not only benefit consumers, but help to drive down prices of other technologies. For example, if IBM released a processor built using this process today, I'm confident Intel's CPU price would drop.
So, what's keeping IBM from releasing hardware based on this technology in 1 to 2 years instead of 10 to 15? Ideas?
It's interesting to think that if people weren't always thinking that Moore's law can't stand up to more than another 10 years, we'd need a new law.
What I mean is that since it takes about 10 years for an emerging technology to go from theory to mass implementation, if there were theories that showed the promise of Moore's Law living on for more than ten years into the future, products based on those theories would emerge faster than Moore's Law predicts.
Fox's Law: The estimated time that Moore's Law will hold true will always be close to the time it takes to turn the latest theory into a commercial product.
Kevin Fox
Kevin Fox
Quake Arena!
:)
In addition, IBM and Intel agree that, especially with faster Internet connections, software will catch up to and exceed the capabilities of today's desktop processors, requiring more performance there as well.
I have one question here: will software really need more and more CPU performance as time goes by? (Code it again, Sam!)
I mean, as the article says, sure, servers and stuff will definitely put good use to the increase in performance, but what about good ol' Joe Sixpack using Excel at his office? I mean, besides from cranking SETI@home units faster, is there really such a need for faster processors at home / office?
Shouldn't other areas of computer science be explored as well? Im sure there's lots of research going on all the time, but if someone were to discover a faster search / compression / whatever algorithm that would make up for a slower processor, wouldnt it?
As usual, that's my opinion... and as I said, the truth is I'll probably use it to play better, faster and bloodier games on my PC
Tongue-tied and twisted, just an earth-bound misfit, I
Learning to fly, Pink Floyd.
>Or would it be impractical or inefficient to do that?
Yes, and yes. At least, for a while.
By the sounds of the article, they've only managed to create a handful of transistors using this new process. All a transistor consists of is 3 layers of semiconductor with interconnects -- not a particularly complex structure. The next phase will be building a non-trivial circuit. This, no doubt, will require reworking of their technique (read: years of research) to produce an experimental prototype. Then comes tuning to actually make it useful. At this point, they're still basically producing the chips "by hand" -- very expensive and time consuming with a very low yields.
Once they've proven that the process really does work (assuming, of course, that it does), and that you could conceivably build a real chip with it, they need to design the mass production fabrication hardware. When that's done, they'll actually be able to turn out a few chips, as you said, on a smaller scale -- no doubt still at tremendous cost.
The last barrier is the infrastructure. The final version of the new process will likely require overhauling one or more existing FABs (or building a new one), again at huge cost, both money and time.
10 years from single transistor demo to the first production model is actually pretty quick. It's the same story again for other innovations -- be it faster/smaller chips, higher density hard disks, holographic storage, whatever. The more radical the new strategy, the longer it takes to get it right and get it ready.
Drinking will help us plan!
Duh.
The moderation is really crazy nowadays. Bremsstrahlung is a physical process, which with high energy particles like X-rays can scatter the lattice of silicon, resulting in spurious irradiation and damage to components.
Mode (3) smart-aleck mode. Press * to return to main menu.
I worked a few years as a design engineer for a major chip equipment manufacturer. Most of the problems in scaling down has been in improving the lithography process as the wavelength of the light is the limiting factor to how fine a detail you can get. The other problem is as you get small widths, you want to etch deeper down to keep the cross section of the channels the same. To do this, you want something that etches straight down instead of spreading sidewards forming a v-channel instead of a square channel. You do this by using highly energized ions. Such technology has been out of development for 2-3 years now. I don't work in that industry anymore, but generally the technology in development is about 2 'notches' away from the leading edge of production. So .10-.13 micron technology is probably in development right now.
Let me correct your measurements a little --
.5 Angstroms, and the wavelength of visible light is usually measured in 100s of nanometers.
A micron usually refers to a micrometer, although many other people use it for a different measurement. An angstrom is (in your notation)E -10 m. So, 10 angstroms is one nanometer. If you really want to talk small, I suppose you could try picometers, femtometers, or apatometers.
To give you an idea of scales, Bhor's radius is about
If you go any smaller, your waves become X-rays and that significantly complicates matters.
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Groove-V. It has a certain ring to it.
Donate background CPU time to fight cancer.
With chips like this, we can fear only one thing: the marketing campaign. Intel's was bad enough, even without a name like V-Groove.
--Jeff