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Nano-sized Microchips? HP Says So.
ImaLamer writes: "A C|Net News story is reporting that HP has announced they have made breakthroughs that 'help turn out powerful computers that fit on the head of a pin with room to spare.' Also in the article, that the patent announced Wednesday, will produce no two chips that are the same. 'Each one will be customized for a particular function,' says Stanley Williams, the chemist on the team. The work was done by himself, Phil Kuekes, a computer architect, and James Heath, a UCLA professor. The chips use nanowires and the chips are said to be even less than the size of bacterium. Sounds cool enough. The biggest part of the breakthrough isn't the chips themselves, but that HP plans to be able to 'fix' chips which come out with imperfections, thus saving money on an already cheap process."
Thank the lord!
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I know this is intended to be funny, but when I read it, it actually frightened me instead. Can you imagine what would happen if this technology were used to manufacture destructive little nanobots that couldn't be seen, but could be inhaled? You think viruses and bacteria are bad? Wait until you see this. Even worse, they can be dynamically programmed from an external source via radio transmitter.
Somebody pinch me and wake me up.
GreyPoopon
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Why is it I can write insightful comments but can't come up with a clever signature?
Now if they can make these machines power themselves forver...
Here is the short version of why I think this is bull: packaging.
Chips can be produced in parallel (many in 1 step per wafer), but their back end processing, and especially the packaging is a serial process. When you have a chip the size of a pinhead, you simply have to artificially make it bigger so that you can connect it to the outside world at a decent price.
I'm not so sure that fixing the chips is a big breakthough, as it sounds like they're suggesting they'll get a lot more defects and not be able to mass produce chips. In fact, the comment that almost each chip will be different suggests a serious problem with their approach.
Remember all the stink over the Pentium II (or was it III?) that had some computing errors in numbers past the 6 or 7th digit? Now if no two chips are the same, how are you going to guarentee that chip A runs a protocol correctly when chip B, designed for the same application, has all its chip-innards set up differently, such that certain logic gates work differently and give different results for the same protocol? Perhaps each chip will indeed be customizable, but if you're producing 1000s of chips per day, do you really want 1000 different chips if you've got orders for 950 in one application and 50 in another? If no chips are the same due to this technology, what a QC nightmare this would be. No one would by it because they could never guarentee that your PC is going to act the same as everyone else's.
I don't know, the whole thing sounds quarter-baked, not even half-baked. My concern is that when these type of annoucements come out, it suggests that the company:
A) Is so far ahead of everyone else they can afford to brag and advertise thier technological edge.
B) Has developed something that's great for technological capablity PR, but is so impossible or impractical to put into practice that revealing its existance is designed to throw competitors off track. Companies tend to publish results when they can't patent it or if they think others are getting ready to patent it and they want to prevent others from getting exclusive rights to it.
I'll admit there is the possiblity HP is onto something, but I think category B above is probably more appropriate here.
-When going for broke, go for Ithaca!