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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.
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