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."

Comments

Re:Of course...

[caesar-auf-nihil]

Not so. As you get down to smaller scales, sometimes heat dissapation becomes easier as there are different methods of heat release than just fans and heat sink.
Basicailly it depends on the structure of the chip. If its inorganic semiconductors, which have to push heat through a rigid crystalline structure, then they tend to hold onto their heat longer due to poor heat conductivity. Therefore, they tend to heat up and stay heated up, and it takes more effort to cool them.

However, while no details were given, the tech probably won't be inorganic semiconductor based, and therefore could just release heat by the release of energy through the chemical bonds in the structure. You would get some heat, but some of that energy would get converted into moving electrons back and forth in each of the molecular bonds. In fact, its possible that they're relying up on the heat to get certain atoms to jump to higher energy state, thus turning a switch on or off, and when they rapidly cool back down, they activate or shut off the switch as appropriate.

Then again, its very likely they haven't considered this, and the first time they hook it up and starting running computations there is a puff of smoke and the chip is now CO2 and ash.