Lightning Rods for Nanoelectronics

dcunning writes "Over the last several years (in my short view) there has been a fairly constant hum as to whether or not processors will continue to be able to keep up with Moore's law. Usually this question (and the arguments answering it) is phrased in terms of the ability to continue to shrink transistors/wires/etc. and escape such things as electron tunneling, etc. Scientific American has an interesting article titled Lightning Rods for Nanoelectronics discussing the how's and what's of another issue: handling electrostatic charges as devices become smaller (and hence more sensitive to both the shock and the resultant heat.) After all, being able to build a 100GHz chip is useless if merely breathing on it will fry its circuitry."

Comments

Time for decentralization and clockless chips.

[wackybrit]

Slashdot covered clockless chips briefly a few months ago. Why do they make sense? To learn why, let's compare computers to real life industry.

In the 1800s, industry was limited to a few very large factories and workplaces. Over time, these factories became bigger and bigger and faster and faster, until eventually it became impractical to make everything in one place. So.. things were decentralized. Now when your car is built, the raw materials come from Brazil, the parts are made in Taiwan, then the cars are built in America.

Processors are headed the same way. Things are becoming decentralized, and the load on the processor should, therefore, go down. The giant leaps and bounds with video cards have actually caused CPUs to have less work to do. No longer do CPUs have to do nasty 3D calculations.. the video cards do it!

Clockless chips work very well in decentralized situations, since they operate based on incoming data, rather than to a clock. This means thousands of non-standard components can work together to produce the same result as one CPU.

Even -car- engines are becoming decentralized now with specialist automatic gearboxes, electric backup motors, and psuedo-petrol engines in the Prius and Insight. With processors it makes even more sense.

References:

Business 2.0 article on Clockless Computing

Economist article on Asynchronous/Clockless chips.

100GHz will be reached

[hatchet]

There will be about 20year delay in moore's law.. but then it will be able to keep up again. But not with classical silicon technology. But rather with some other advanced technology... transistors at quantum level? Or maybe advanced molecules which are able to calculate electrons. We shall see...

Two-stage bus interface

[drinkypoo]

Simple enough; You have a two-stage bus interface. You put more and more of the computer into the CPU and then you wrap the CPU up in a package (hopefully just a PGA or what have you, though I suppose you could make the argument for going back to slotted connections) which uses slower logic to do the bus communications.

You need to put more cache on the CPU's substrate for this, vastly more L2 that is. And a wider memory bus will be necessary, but we're going that way anyway.

If you got really froggy you could even do this with MEMS; Use a physically breakable connection to supply power to the really delicate stuff and optically isolate it from the bus interface circuitry.

Metallurgy to the rescue

[Orne]

I just ran accross this article on Yahoo about zirconium tungstate. Its a metal combination of zirconium, tungsten and oxygen, with the remarkable property that it shrinks when heated, almost proportional to temperature from near absolute zero to the high 700 degrees F.

Immediate proposed applications are dental fillings (heat stress is a leading cause of making fillings chip), microchips, and fiber optics.