Slashdot Mirror
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?
Username taken, please choose another one.
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.
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
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.