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

Interesting story...

[Uttles]

So much so that I posted it this morning, only from the Yahoo! site: HP Says Atom-Sized Computer Chips a Lot Closer

The fact that they are going to be able to fix the chips is a big breakthrough, but the biggest thing here is the process for making the chips. They are breaking the chips into different functional areas, and this is what enables (indirectly) the capability to do "chip fixing."

Re:Interesting story...

[caesar-auf-nihil]

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.

Re:Interesting story...

[dhovis]

Stan Williams, one of the guys mentioned here, came to my department to give a talk about the work they were doing at HP about 2 years ago.

What they are doing is really facinating, and it's not quite as simple as just re-programming the chip when they come off the line. The chips will continue to develop defects, even during service.

The way they get around this is to design a fault tolerant processing scheme. When you drop the sizes down as much as these people are, you get a several order of magnitude increase in the number of transistors, so you can afford to have the chip do the same calculation, say 500 times in different sections of the chip. The chip itself can figure out what sections are bad, and stop using them on its own.

HP actually built a full size computer where they designed some ASICs that computed using lookup tables (!). They had them fabed and asked the fab to send them the defective chips along with the good ones. They then mixed the good chips and bad chips together (I think it was like a 1/2 good/bad ratio) and hired a high school student to hook up the wiring. Now keep in mind that even on the "defective" chips, part of the chip still worked. It only takes 1 defect to spoil a traditional chip. On the whole, the components on the chips had about a 3% defect rate.

The whole thing ran at a whopping 1MHz and may not have been wired up exactly to specifications, but it was "programmed" with a standard computer first to find the defects and route around them. Performance wise, it was on par with the fastest HP workstations of the day. (there's the MHz myth for you)

So the idea here is to design chips that have so many circuits that you can afford to build in fault tolerance. What is more, you can afford to have the chips constantly checking themselves looking for new faults.

In short, zero defect tolerence is not necessarily a good thing. One defect in one transistor can render a Pentium processor worthless. The smaller you make them, and the more transistors you add, the harder it will be to achieve defect free parts. Yields go down, price goes up.

And if you don't believe me, they published an article in Science about the computer they built (it was called Teramac IIRC)

vaporware

[stipe42]

Vaporware . . . chips so small they can be inhaled.

stipe42
www.pcwatch.com

Re:vaporware

[Kaa]

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?

Yes.

Moreover, people with a much better imagination and command of language than I already imagined this:

Neal Stephenson "The Diamond Age".

...

[raindog151]

From the HP Nano-chip(tm) manual :

In order to make sure your HP Nano-chip(tm) will continue working, please AVOID the following :

* Windy areas
* Opening windows
* Sneezing
* Breathing
* Movements of any sort
* Using cooling fans

By making sure you follow these simple guidelines, your HP Nano-chip(tm) will provide years of quality computing power!