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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."
Why? Couldn't you put it in a glass ball or something rather than a standard PGA type chip? A non-conductive oil bath maybe?
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This is a really important consideration. Most people don't even know how sensitive modern electronics are to ESD. Heck, you don't even have to TOUCH something to fry it these days, the electric field itself can be strong enough to zap cmos devices.
Taking a training class on ESD control was a real eye-opener; seeing it demonstrated before my eyes drove home the point that ESD safety precautions are CRITICAL when working on stuff.
Since taking that class, we have implemented an ANSI 20.20 compliant service bay for PC hardware, and requested that all our distributors ship us parts manufacturer-sealed (they used to 'test' motherboards before they sent them to us). We have reduced our number of returns from customers immensely since then.
Learn how a CPU works before you learn to program. Seriously.
It is all about how much performance per dollar you can deliver. If you only get a 50% yeild from your processes since the chip can't take the real world, you probably get a bad ratio.
There have been a similar discussion concering clock frequencies earlier today, and I'd say that the same arguments work here too.
I'm sort of stuck to say anything other than "and?".
Basically for this stuff to be a problem it needs to be into widespread manufacturing and that's not going to happen for a long time (we are still using 0204 [2milx4mil]discrete components for example and 00501's are available and we aren't using them) due to the cost of production.
Otherwise, yes ESD is a problem and the only answer is better ESD handling and better circuit design to counter ESD issues. Current TTL electronics can be utterly blown by someone touching it so it won't be any different.
I remember reading once why they'd never be able to break the 25MHz barrier. And another bemoaning the fact that we'd never be able to produce submicron traces.
While I know it won't be me, there will be some clever person somewhere who will wave their magic wand (figuratively) and dissipate static electricity problems. I refuse to believe that the market will let manufacturers STOP hunting for solutions.
John
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.
mogorific carpentry experiments
Month after month, I see here on slashdot postings pointing out some thing or another in Scientific American. Just subscribe to the PRINT EDITION and get the same info weeks in ahead of the "fast electronic web version!" This was on the cover of the print edition that came to my house a month ago!
Nanoelectrons with friggin' lasers on their heads!!
my other penis is a vagina
Whats the point of being able to build a 100GHz chip is useless if merely breathing on it will fry its circuitry.
Whats the point of building a circuit so fast that a signal can only go 3mm in a tick? (3.0*10^8 m/s)/100GHz
I know that signal speed is a substantial fraction of lightspeed, so that makes the problem worse- can you make a viable processor that small (3mm)? Wouldn't you have to design it so basically the chip doesn't wait for the previous cycle to finish?
I know 100GHz is just an off-the-cuff example, and I don't know much about processor design, so please enlighten me- it just seems like we're going to have to go completly different routes pretty soon.
and no, I have not read the article.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
(it's actually less of a problem sucking as opposed to blowing)
Sounds like someone is still not married...
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing -- Emo Phillips
I have seen many posts here that disregard the serious technical limitation imposed by classical computing by just saying 'Engineers will solve it, they always do'. That is like saying that faster than light travel is only an engineering problem. New computing paradigms are needed. Most predictions says that most of us will witness Moore's Law fail due to quantum mechanical and thermodynamical reasons. Instead of blindly pretending that the engineers will magically solve the problem it would be more proactive to start learning more about the prospects the next generation of technologies. We need to think, not to hope for something magical to happen.
"There is no teacher but the enemy."-Mazer Rackham
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.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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.
Neurons do NOT have electrical interconnects, they have chemical ones. All the electrical activity takes places within the neuron.
I too handle DIMMs with my bare hands on a daily basis, yet, surprisingly, I've only fried one DIMM in the past two years.
How is this possible, you ask? Well, even if your workplace isn't designed to limit ESD (our shop's working areas are), all you have to do is to make sure that you ground yourself before you touch sensitive equipment. All of our workbences have metal frames that are grounded, and they're all over the place, so all you have to do is to tap one before you touch your equipment and you're set. You VERY rarely just spontaneously generate an SE charge just by standing (or sitting) around.
On top of all that, I think you have to give the equipment designers more props for the good job they do in designing the ESD protection into the equipment. Ram sticks and such are not nearly as vulnerable, in my experience, as you suggest.
Design the chips to be self-repairing.
If that is possible, the next logical step I see is self building chips. I have for a long time had a weird idea, I know most people will say it is physically impossible, and they are probably right. But if my idea turns out to be possible it is really going to make a fantastic chip. Imagine a chip that could build a copy of itself, just not the same size but rather smaller in area. If the chip could encapsulate a smaller copy into itself we could start having fun. If the chip could make two smaller copies of itself it, and the childs can keep up with the same principle it would be ready for business. I call this fractal computing. Imagine if it was possible on every layer to increase the speed by just a few %.
Do you care about the security of your wireless mouse?
Maybe if you are walking on shag carpet in the middle of the desert of the least humid day of the year while shuffling your feet more than Michael Jackson, but under normal circumstances absolutely not.
I know somebody who did this too. Actually, a vaccuum works if the cannister is kept far away from the computer, and you use proper attachments (for some, you can buy PC cleaning attachments). However, one person I knew used a dustbuster to clean inside the computer. It was that it sucked up anything important or jarred something, it was the electromagnetic field caused by the dustbuster motor that fried a fair bit of sensitive circuitry. And this was back in the old days, when chips were not quite so sensitive as now.
The moral of this story? It's good to get the dust out because it's bad for your computer. It's very bad to use anything that generates electromagnetic fields at close range...
compressed air=usually ok
vacuum=not great
dustbuster=that ominous blank screen when you turn on a PC
- phorm
The pinouts of semiconductor devices are protected with diodes. There is no problem with electric discharge, as long as you don't zap an integrated circuit with a half-inch long spark.
The original poster is correct. Something has gone wrong somewhere in the Slashdot story, which is sensationalistic, while the Scientific American story is not. Remember that the Slashdot editors are knowledgeable about computers, but not electronics.
It is quite easy to protect chips from overvoltage. The Sci Am story is merely providing information.
As the Scientific American story says, field emission devices (very, very small spark gaps) will protect even the highest-speed transistors.