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Intel Creates 30-Nanometer Transistors
SirFlakey writes: "It appears Moore's law has been proven right yet again. According to a report in Fairfax's IT section, Intel has managed to create the world's smallest transistor(s). This, according to the article would allow them to create CPU's with 10 times (420 million) the P4's transistor count. The transistors are only 3 Atoms thick(!). They say they have come close to the limit of modern technology but also still have plenty of innovation left for the future. This annoucement comes only a few days after it released an earnings warning for this quarter."
This will be like the first discussion of that kind.. oh, no, what am I thinking. Ofcourse there WILL be Intel bashing... C'mon, the guys are trying to invent/achieve something. Give them some credits.
Congrats, Intel crew!
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So Intel has a transistor which is three atoms thick. According to Moore's Law, within 18 months Intel will come out with a transistor 1.5 atoms thick. Hmm, I guess the portable atom smasher isn't very far away!
/. editors have to ruin a great advance like this one by linking it to Intel's financial troubles. What are you guys saying? Intel won't be around in 18 months to top this achievement? Or is it a "But you're still losing marketshare to AMD so Nyah!" kind of mentality? Advances in science are advances in science. Just because they were made by a company with profit in mind doesn't mean their scientific discoveries won't be shared.
But seriously, I don't see why
Steven
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Good point. So perhaps IBM can etch silicon wafers down to such lilliputian dimensions, but what about thermal instability? With 3-atom-wide transistors, I'm guessing the number of electrons needed to hold a charge in a flop ain't all that much, and the alpha radiation from nearby lead (e.g. solder) could become a big(ger) concern.
Or did they forget to mention such a device is really only reliable around absolute zero?
Who said they would still be soldering parts together with lead? What about another material?
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
Actually, quantum computing is not (just) about making transistors very small. It's a totally different way of doing the computing, as many a slashdot article has pointed out :). This Scientific American article is a good overview of the subject, as well.
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a 747 filled with CD-ROMs.
Aid for the clueless: smaller transistors put off less heat so you can run them faster. Smaller transistors can be packed more closely so you can run them faster. Smaller transistors can have more of them fitted to the same chip, allowing nifty architectures so you can run things faster.
In other words, smaller = faster.
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Considering quantum effects like tunelling, how exactly would you power such a 3-atom transistor processor?
It would apparently consume only very little amounts of electricity, but considering how thin the paths would be, perhaps internal resistance would rise, making temperature rise and demanding higher voltages. Higher voltages make quantum tunneling and sheer molecular structure reconfiguration much more likely.
The result would be either generalized short circuits or destruction of paths (with formation of others), I suppose.
Of course this is the first thing Intel thinks of, but it be very interesting to know how they'd manage to pull such a feat off using real world materials and at room temperature.
Flavio
The lattice constant (distance between the center of adjacent atoms) in silicon is 5.43 angstroms. Thus one would assuem that 30nm (300 angstroms) is actually about 55 atoms thick.
Most likely the 30nm refers to the gate length and the 3 atom reference was a 'misguided' measure of the gate dielectric thickness. The reason I say misguided is because dielectrics tend to be molecules not atoms. Although 3 molecules is thin, such thicknesses have already been reported before.
So much spin. But I guess it makes sense since IEDM (International Electron Device Meeting) is occurring soon and everyone loves to get excited about the newest small transistors.
is the name of the process being used to create the chips. From a May 2000 C/Net article on the process:
"Reducing circuit size is the cornerstone of Moore's Law, which states that the number of transistors capable of being put on a processor should double every 18 months. Shrinking circuits allows manufacturers to put more transistors onto a wafer, which in turn increases power. Unfortunately, the current technique, called DUV lithography, will likely hit its limit around 2003.
Controlling small wavelength light, however, is not easy. Current lithography machines depend on lenses to focus light. Because EUV light would be absorbed by glass, the new system will use a series of four specially coated convex mirrors to capture the mask
image and reduce it. The mirrors each contain 80 separate metallic layers just 12 atoms thick.
The technology stems from work at Stanford University. The laser-light technique, meanwhile, derived from work on missile defense systems, said Dave Attwood, a professor at the University of California and a researcher on the project.
EUV machines will be able to process about 80 wafers an hour, approximately the same as current lithography machines, making the process economically feasible."
I wonder what will it cost for chipmakers to transition over to the EUV technology? Intel is huge and would obviously be more able to make a capital investment like this than competitors.
Goat sex free since 2001
Intel has been using the same basic archetecture for the past 20 years.
The question that must be posed after bitching about Intel's dogged adherence to the x86 architecture is how will you get the world to change from x86 when we are already heading towards the dream of one billion connected devices, all using x86? If we suddenly decide to change to a completely new way of processing then we are going to render all of these one billion connected devices entirely obsolete - and you thought you had enough trouble keeping up with clock speed changes!
It's the same problem with the oil industry. There are too many people who have invested too much time, people and money into petroleum fuel for it to be chucked away at a moment's notice. That's the reason we're not driving Hydrogen-fuelled fuel cell cars now. So it obviously seems that if Intel won't make the switch to the next level (whatever that is) then we're going to be using the same old shit for the next 20 years!
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Computer: A device that multiplies a user's ability to make mistakes.
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When the pin is pulled, Mr. Grenade is no longer our friend.
It expects to sell 400 million-transistor processors able to do 400 million calculations in the time it takes to blink.
Thanks for telling us the calculcations per blink, that's a real useful measurement system.
Is this all in aid of bringing us yet another implementation of that wonderful, anti-orthogonal 16/32-bit dinosaur instruction set? If they spent half as much effort on Merced, or better yet, revving a really good design like PA-RISC, we might get somewhere.
PA-8200 -> 4 flops per clock sustained
PA-8700 -> 8 flops per clock sustained
Intel P4 on dual RAMBUS -> 0.14 flops per clock sustained
"but also still have plenty of innovation left for the future."
whew! and i was afraid we were going to run out of innovation soon. thank goodness they let us know that they've stocked up.
eudas
Blessed is he who expects the worst, for he shall not be disappointed.
Just like silicon replaced by diamond - it's probably going to have a significantly (but not radically) different manufacturing process. I think that each process, such as diamond boards, or atomic transistors, will require a revolution in a particular technology, but since these benefits in process will all happen at different times I strongly believe the technology as a whole evolves. Thus, each little revolution in a particular piece of production results in the evolution of the technology as a whole.
According to a post some time ago IBM acheived 10 nanometers as described in a pervious post. If intel claims their 30nm is smaller then IBM's 10nm they are smokeing something. http://slashdot.org/articles/00/08/12/1520241.shtm l
Every tool reaches a level of development after which no further development is necessary or usefull. A framing hammer made today is essentially the same as a framing hammer made twenty years ago because there's no useful improvement to be made. A head machined to a nanometer's accuracy or a handle make of some wacky wundermaterial would not make my hammer any more useful to me.
Instead, progress goes into a different kind of tool. My wood and metal hammer is fine for my occasional homeowner projects, but someone with more carpentry ambition would also have a high-tech nailgun.
Same with computers. There comes a point where the typical consumer just doesn't need any more power. That's why you can still find new P-90 systems being sold - for a personal net access/word processing box, that's enough. There are many people who are no more interested in playing Quake III or doing video editing on their PC than I am in building an addition to my house as a DIY project.
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You cannot wash away blood with blood
The inverse proportion even runs to metaphors. I remember an ad or article or something a few years ago about how this speed-demon new CPU stole the poor engineer's coffee break -- well, now he'll get it back while the damn thing reboots. Maybe with a vacation thrown in for lagniappe.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
You are aware of how a transistor actually works, right? It's pretty simple... just layered silicon, simply put. Not much room to do anything except make it smaller.
However, a smaller transistor means you can cram more into something the size of your standard issue ppga chip. Mo' transistors + mo' powah - mo' size = mo' speed - mo' heat. And that is, my friend, a good thing.
-CoG
"And with HIS stripes we are healed"
-CoG
"And with HIS stripes we are healed"
Handel's "Messiah"
"Ma'am, you really shouldn't use this magnet to hold up pictures on your computer case. We found about 14 billion transistors stuck to it."
...and the new ultra-handy "What do I look like, some kinda atomic physicist?"
Or the brand new "Yeah, we had to charge you to swap out the bad electrons."
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Let me give you the lowdown
My understanding of semiconductor design is a little shaky, but don't these devices work by localizing a charge somewhere inside them? If that's the case and the device is only the size of 3 atoms, won't it be extremely difficult to localize a charge into that space. Even geting the thing to hold a single electron seems unlikely becuase of the couloumb repulsion, spin orbit coupling, etc that souch a small device would have to overcome.
Also, if they are working with conventional processes, how will they deal with the diffraction and quantum effects of shooting electrons or photons through the mask which they use to create the chips? I'll be very interested to see the details that the article said would be realeased tomorrow, because this promises to be extraordinarily revolutionary physics if they have indeed succeeded in producing transistors this small.
> The transistors are only 3 Atoms thick
:-)
Of course its leads still had to be spaced 0.1" apart for breadboarding, but damn are they thin!
They'd just skip trying to go smaller and move directly into phase 15: Creating talking llamas whose entire cell structure is a computer.
Kinda gives whole new meaning to GIGO and WYSIWYG, eh?
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Let me give you the lowdown
Yah, even though I am an AMD supporter, I would not want to see Intel parish. If that did happen, AMD would just turn into another Intel and we would be back to square one.
Buying a Dell computer is equivalent to dropping the soap in a prison shower.
This one as some info on the physics in such small scale devices.
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Jon - TheSpork
Yeah, and 400 million transistors gives a lot of room for design slop--more space for slapping together pre-designed components.
Any idiot can make a circuit that adds two 1-bit numbers. Any idiot can also string 128 of 1-bit adders together to make a 128-bit adder. That's how damn near *all* logic circuits are designed. Wash, rinse, and repeat. No big deal.
Sure, any idiot can string together 128 1-bit adders, but designing a 128 bit adder to run at that high of a clock speed takes a bit more work. It would have to use some kind of carry-lookahead logic trick to get everything it needed done in one cycle. Point being, putting together a solid, optimized component like that DOES take some serious design time--if for nothing else to but to do the math using a CAD program or espresso. And if that takes effort, getting your stuff to play nice at a high enough clock speed must take more!
I'm far and away no pro [yet] at this sort of thing, but from what I've done myself so far (just introductory digital design stuff, building components and simple clocked machines) it would take a long time to put together something this complex and do it right. Witness the P4.
-s
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Don't worry, being eaten by a crocodile is just like going to sleep in a giant blender.
Customer: Your program crashes randomly. It must be a bug.
Support: It's not a bug. It's a quantum fluctuation.
The description only mentions the thickness, not how wide or long these transistors must be. Perhaps they can build them sideways where they need to fit a lot of them together.
It seems like at that level of thickness you would have to start concerning yourselves with the crystaline structures of whatever you're using to insulate between layers of transistors.
With it only 3 atoms thick you'd think that there would be fab screwups causing bands in the transistors to narrow to an unusable level - probably happening quite frequently. Would play hell with your yield thats for certain.
I wonder, though, if they're doing work with transistor area. If a reduction to 3 atoms thick bought them another 10 years of industry life I wonder what shrinking the sides by 1/2 would do.
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With these chips, computers will be able to translate verbal commands or conversations from one language to another in real time, or search massive and complex optical databases.
Don't you just love the examples that are used to "show off" the speed of new chips to the masses? Is translating verbal commands in real time to another language really the killer app we've all been waiting for?
You: "Cocine una cena para mí!"
Computer: "Screw you."
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a 747 filled with CD-ROMs.
Every major advance in the last 40 years has been due to increases in clock speed and switch density. Cute tricks like caching and dual-piping or whatever they're calling it this year are flea bites on the butt of real progress. Remember what an "advance" the 486 was over the 386? The corporate boojums need things to market so they make things up when there's nothing real in the pipe, but when something real comes along it doesn't have to be marketed to you because you sure as damn hell notice it.
I mean, my relatively nonobsolte PIII is real cool, but would it really be that much cooler than a machine with 486-level architecture running at the same 450 MHz? For that matter I have to wonder how my tired old 8-bit friends would fare if one could run them at a good fraction of a GHz. Sure, you buy some extra clocks with all those extra transistors trying to second-guess look-ahead your code, but I wonder if that's the best use of all that high-speed silicon. Maybe a *cough* beowulf cluster */cough* of, say, Z80-level CPUs all fabbed on one chip and running at 1GHz could do some really interesting things by comparison.
If this thing is real then great for Intel and for us, it doesn't really matter what architecture they apply it to; and if it isn't real it won't save them when something that is does come along, not matter how good their press releases are.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
I was just talking with a collegue working on Bose-Einstein condensations (BEC) and I asked what some of the uses were. Due to the way BECs work statically/quantum mechanically one can create any interferance pattern within the BEC. He said that there are people working on trying to figure out ways of using this property to replace the etching processes used today to create things like computer chips by creating a interferance pattern in the form that one wants and then laying the BEC on the matterial (there is more to it than that but you know that). This would allow for manufacture of things at the 3 atom level. Of course, as someone else mentioned, 30 Nanometers is larger than 3 atoms thick. Lattice structures of silicides are roughly between .1 and .9 nm [1].
Theoretically this is possible, now whether this is practical is a whole different ball park.
[1]V.E. Borisenko: Semi-conducting Silicides (Springer, New York): pp 3-5
Disclamer - Opinion of Person
Actually, we don't use the same thing that was invented in 1947 for ICs now. There are all kinds of transistors. BJTs, IGBTs, FETs, MOSFETs. The latter being the type used in modern semiconductor technology. Forgive any errors (I've not yet taken solid state), but whereas a conventional transistor emits a collector-emitter current proportional (the gain) to the base-emitter current, a MOSFET's gate is a capacitor (in fact the capacitors used for DRAM are just MOSFETs) where the current through them is proportional to the voltage across the gate. They are much more disposed to on-off operation than operation over a linear region, because it requires minimal (gate capacitor leakage current) energy to maintain a MOSFET gate state, whereas to represent a '1' on a BJT would take a constant supply of current, irregardless of whether it had changed recently or not.
BJT = Bipolar Junction Transistor
IGBT = Insulated Gate Bipolar Transistor
FET = Field Effect Transistor
MOSFET = Metal Oxide Semiconductor Field Effect Transistor
As you can see, there have been many advances more significant than having the boys in the back room develop a better/smaller/faster/more powerful widget.
Given the smaller and smaller transitors, I have always wondered what the effect of ionizing radiation is on these things. Granted, your average cpu is not out in outer space someplace, but even your everyday enviroment has its share of crud running around (Xenon from granite ferinst). Are we going to have to be careful about protecting these tinie weenie gates that use using very, very few electrons, or are we going to have to build error detecting/correcting logic into the cpu itself?
Rather than looking into new and innovative ways to increase a CPUs power like Sun does with their Ultrasparc line or Digital did with their Alphas or even AMD has done with their line of chips, they just try to keep shrinking the size of the transitors, pumping more of them into the CPU, and ramping up the clock speed. When are they going to learn that the x86 architecture is dead dead dead? I REALLY hope they don't screw up Merced.. err.. Itanium by keeping the prices too artificially high. I'd really like to see that technology move into consumer PCs instead of just servers. We need a stepping stone out of the x86 world while preserving the cost factor that makes x86 based systems a more palatable choice over the higher end and more expensive workstations.
Well....it states they could make a processor with ten times as many transistors.....OR....they could make the same processor ten times smaller! Why not do that?
-Just a thought....
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-Julius X
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Good lord thats a lot. This should fill in nicely while molecular computing advances to the point of commercial feasibility as a technology.
:o)
However, one thing that amazes me even more is how much effort its going to take to actually design a chip that uses 400 mil transistors! I'm a computer engineering student: designing small stuff using just a few is enough for me.
I guess Intel'll be hiring soon.
-S
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Don't worry, being eaten by a crocodile is just like going to sleep in a giant blender.
Don't blame Intel on that... blame the vendor of whatever OS you happen to be using... Though, from what i've heard, BeOS boots within 10 or 15 seconds and Mac OS X is supposedly going to power right on up as well, so it's doable.
Couldn't an OS take a hardware inventory and mirror its ram to disk on shutdown, then at startup, if the BIOS didn't report any changes to the hardware configuration, simply load the last memory image and forget about have to go through the entire boot process?
This is not an issue for laptops, PDA's, or the physical size of the computer under you desk. What this does affect is VLSI (ULSI?) IC's. Reduced tranistor size means lower operating voltages. Which means you can scale down supply voltage, which reduces electric field strength and power dissapation in the tranisistors. This leads to boosted device density and switching speed. In short this allows VLSI designers to create faster, more complex and powerfull IC's and/or ones that require less power(this could affect your laptops and PDA's). As for powerfull and complex look at the IBM Power4 processor it contains 170 million transistors, SIA (Semiconductor Industry Association) predicted in 1999 that by 2002 microprocessors would contain 76 million transistors !!! This is all because of the incredible shrinking transistor.
;)
It's really nice that you think its time for a major computing breakthrough. Personally, I think its about time for a major transportation breakthough, something that really catapults transportation into a new era, not unlike the invention of the wheel itself
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What I can't see is how one can lay down anything 3 atoms thick (or wide) reliably (in the sense of real-world mass manufacture, not one of a time in-the-lab productions) using scaled versions of existing Fab tachnologies and without some nano-assembler type technology. Worst case you'll get 3 atoms somewhere in the middle of the wafer and maybe 5 or 0 at the edges ....
This sort of tech will come one day - but I beleive it's going have to be by revolution, not evolution ....
It ought to be instant on by now. Sheesh.