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Chicken-Feather Chips
gtaylor writes "The Washington Post reports that University of Delaware chemical engineer proposes to replace silicon with chicken feather composites -- since the feathers apparently make the electrons fly. (Unlike turkeys.)"
April 1st was months back. What nonsense is this?
The whole point of using silicon is it's semiconducting capabilities. You just don't get that from 'chicken feathers'.
Would you like your Pentium in Original or Extra Crispy?
Can you imagine what Chicken Run 2 will look like?
Mc Donalds recently replaced the chicken burger by an artificial silicon-based meat substitute.
IANAL, but imagine a beowulf cluster of in Soviet Russia all your belong are base to us welcoming the new SCO overlords.
These signals travel faster in the presence of some materials than others. Air, for instance, allows the fastest movement of all, because it provides essentially no resistance. When traveling near solids, however, the movement tends to kick up opposing positive charges. These charges can distract the signal from completing its appointed rounds.
So what are they saying? Air offers no electrical resistance? Last I heard, air was one of the best insulators around. Or did they perchance confuse resistance with the dielectric value?
Did you know you can fertilize your lawn with used motor oil?
"I can't give you a brain, so I'll give you a diploma" - The Great Oz (blatently stolen sig)
This article is very poorly written... lots of technical errors. As a professional in the semiconductor industry, I'm having trouble envisioning how this guy could actually replace silicon with chicken feathers.
For one thing, they seem to talking about the dielectric constant of the materials. For chips, a low dielectric constant material between the metal lines is good, because it reduces the RC time delay. That's why you might have heard all the buzz about low-K dielectrics. But these are state-of-the art nanoporous materials that are designed for good deposition, thickness control, and etchability... I just can't see how you could do the same with chicken feathers.
As for replacing the silicon itself? No way. Silicon is a unique material with semiconducting properties, meaning you can change its resistance by added small controlled amounts of dopant atoms. It can be made in large single crystal ingots with very low defect and impurity level. How in the world could you replace a single crystal with chicken feathers??? Hell, the fibers alone are 100's of times bigger than current gate widths.
Me remains a bit skeptical.
No. Basically this would spur on the "Animal Free" PC industry. However, the Animal Free PCs would be much hated and protested by environmental protection groups because of the harmful chemicals found within instead of biodegradable chicken feathers. Now the people that are both are going to be very confused.
_______________________________
"I'm not Conceited...I'm just a realist..."
Wool's team took chicken feathers and plant oils and molded them into a composite material that approximates the shape and feel of silicon.
Wouldn't "approximates the electrical characteristics of silicon" be better then just making a silicon substitute that looks and feels like silicon?
When the researchers tested it for speed, they found that the composite allowed movement at about twice the rate of silicon. Though that's still slower than the speed in air, Wool said, "I was jumping up and down."
It doesn't sound like they actually created a gate. Isn't creating something that conducts electricty a far cry from creating something that can actually be used as a gate in a circuit?
And finally. Why does it sound like this guy is wasting the tax payers money?
The reason silicon is used for integrated circuit chips is because it's a semiconductor - a material that can conduct or insulate depending on the electrical conditions around it. Chicken feathers do not semiconduct.
As for electric signals travelling best through air... would you rather be standing ten feet from a power line, or reaching out with a metal fishing rod to touch it?
As far as I can tell, the discussion seems to be a garbled description of using organic fibers/composites as a dielectric (insulating) material instead of oxides or nitrides. Much research has been done over the past several years looking for "low-K dielectrics". The "K" parameter is a measure of how an insulator interacts with an electric field imposed on it. A high-K material has more capacitance when you put a voltage across it; low-k materials for bulk insulators reduce the capacitance between wires (and between wires and the substrate). This reduces wire delays.
An attractive area of research has been to put voids (bubbles or pores) into the dielectric material. Because gases tend to have low dielectric constants, introducing gas-filled voids in the dielectric will reduce the capacitance that two wires insulated by the dielectric will feel. This is what the "microbubbles" comment in the article refers to.
I guess this guy wants to grind up chicken feathers and paste them on to a wafer instead of growing an oxide. Among other things, he'll need to remove all particles larger than a few tens of nanometres for this to not introduce defects in the chip. Good luck.
They said that the new 'Camilla' processor will be out in q4 of 2002.
What a load of blox
" These signals travel faster in the presence of some materials than others. Air, for instance, allows the fastest movement of all, because it provides essentially no resistance. When traveling near solids, however, the movement tends to kick up opposing positive charges. These charges can distract the signal from completing its appointed rounds.
Though these signals move more slowly in the presence of silicon than they do in air, silicon offers less resistance than many other materials do. That's why it has been used in microchips for so long. But engineers are always looking for ways to turbocharge their chips. Historically, they have been able to do this by inscribing more transistors into ever-tinier spaces. But some worry that a physical limit may be approaching. "
SFAIK, this is shit. Silicon is good because it produces the second hightest number of compounds (carbon comes tops) and it's metalic, SFA to do with risistance. copper/gold and diamond have less resistance?
Mr wool and his wooly ideas!
Next he'll inject sheep so that they shead there flease.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
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