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Reinventing The Transistor For Molecular Computing
unnique writes "MIT's Technology Review, has an article on HP's research into finding a new way to make transistors smaller, and further stretching Moore's law." The article has some nice illustrations of the nano-componentry they're working on, too.
But "big deal". Many such aspiring endeavors have been undertaken at the expense of a large corporation's purse, only to fail miserably. I applaud their attempt to better technology and wish them the best, but I'll reserve judgement on the ultimate worthiness of thier crusade until they actually do something.
it's really more of an OBSERVATION than a LAW. a THEOREM at best.
A theorem is better than a law ! It can't be wrong ! What could be better than a theorem ?
"Moore's law" is a postulate perhaps, not a theorem (since it hasn't been proven)
Theorems are reptitions of testable hypotheses that uphold the same result.
Laws are correlates of facts.
Theorems can be wrong. They simply haven't proven that way, yet.
That's a good question and the answer is "technology media coverage sucks".
Far-out technology ten or twenty years from plausible implementation makes a much better story then technology that's appearing on the shelf today, which is drowned out by the marketing message and if you're lucky, some semi-meaningful buzzwords.
However, the electronic industry is actually quite good about converting technology into actual products. It just isn't talked about as much because it's so "ho-hum". Let me remind you that 2,400,000,000,000 bits that fit in the palm of your hand is something so amazing that you really can't even understand it in any real way.
Look into the technologies in current use for hard drive manufacturing, processor manufacturing, and the other such hardware you use day to day (including non-computer stuff). You'll find enough stuff to make a 1970's sci-fi author wet their pants. It just doesn't make good copy.
Putting "ry" on the end of the word doesn't make it a plural, even in your two cases. Instead, it describes a part of it's root word. Bigots have bigotry. Toiletries are part of a toilet (the room, "I'm going to the toilet.").
Likewise, componentry is used in the fabrication of components. It becomes a part of finished components. That's why it's found on 30,000 Google pages.
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To some point you might be right but your statement is too generalized.
Where do you think chip innovation is coming from? Intel, AMD, IBM... Are these small firms? No.
Universities and small firms can only do so much research because as the sizes of transistors and chips decreases, fabrication and research costs increase exponentially.
And if you read the article, it says that 12.5 million was provided by the govt and matching funds by HP.
Do you think HP is breaking the bank by providing that kind of money?
This endeavor is not Itanium sized in terms of a cash sink.
You got to start somewhere. If you think the microprocessor industry is where it is without its share of research and faliures, its not true.
The catch is, it's a lot easier to make money selling silicon (or diamond, or DNA, or nanotubes, or whatever...)
you are assuming a 2 demensional chip. In 3 demensions it would have about 122000 atoms per side, which makes it about 1mm cubed. You may ask how we access all those atoms on the inside, but really, who cares, we can let our grand-kids figure that out.
Has anyone considered how long we can keep streching this, sooner, or later (I believe latest estimates are 10 years), we are going to hit a bottleneck caused by electrons jumping paths, If we keep minimising like this;
Therefor, we have three options I see.
First - we opt to double die size, and hence see an appropriate improvement with minimal heat issues. Although lag between outer sectors of the processor is an issue. (This same solution could be applied to building 3D chipsets, but heat would be an issue.)
Second - we use optical based chipsets, this has the advantage of letting us minimise a lot more, however the technology hasnt been perfected, and it is VASTLY different to what we are currently using, and could suffer from external interference caused by heat (contracting/expanding glass/plastic tubules will form a primitive lens).
Third - we opt for more efficient systems, Hyperthreading is a good example of this, allowing a processor to use sections that are otherwise unused to do several operations at once. However, this requires a change in programming practices to allow for the change to multithreaded applications as standard, something which most programmers are not willing to engage nor understand.
Of course there are more solutions, however I still see we are going to be very limited with copper, silicon or germanium[sp?] circuits in the next decade.
-Gwala
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