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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.
its really more of an OBSERVATION than a LAW. a THEOREM at best. While it has held true through my short lifetime so far, it certainly does not qualify as a LAW.
I got it! Put the stuff inside a small glass vacuum bubble and make it hot so that electrons jump from one plate to another when............nevermind
Table-ized A.I.
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.
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.
on 200 gigabit nanotube memory cubes.
I am not so sure I want my chips to be living organisms. On the otherhand I am certain that the choice between faster organic computer and slower inorganic computer would be a no-brainer. I'm just rooting for the inorganics right now. Thought then there is ice-nine goo and all that to be concerned about which is not much better than a computer virus destroying all life forms.
A 'puter [not including DNA synths which incidentaly should be cautiously defended since they are potential hacking targets to 3li4e geno-hackers] passing a virus directly to a human (or some other animal) becomes a probability when the computer has a DNA factory as part of its makeup.
Amplification seems like a reasonable quick solution to hard problems of routing traveling salesmen, but make sure you don't get any of it on you.
-- Each tock of the Planck clock is a new world and here we are still life. --
"Componentry?" Er, what? I'm going to label this one a bullshit buzzword. It does not seem to appear in the dictionary, and the obligatory GoogleFight would seem to confirm that "components" is the accepted term.
Timothy, perhaps you are confused by standard English usage patterns. You see,
toilet -> toiletry and
bigot -> bigotry,
but
apple -> apples and
component -> components.
Gordon Moore made his famous observation in 1965, just four years after the first planar integrated circuit was discovered. This law was finally proven in 1989 with the release of the vernable 486(TM) DX processor from Intel.
Due to incredible market forces and other mysterious occurences that remain unexplained to this time, chip speed doubled every two years. This remained true even through the infamous Intel factory shutdown in 1991.
The plant was closed for a period of seventeen months due to widespread worker illness. The engineers at Intel had been under tremendous pressure to design a new chip that would double the speed of the impressive 486 DX. Sadly, the engineers were stumped. Adding to this incredible pressure was the unexplanable illness that spread about the facillity like wildfire. This illness would render an otherwise healthy person unconscious for a period of seventeen months. The afflicted person would then rise as if nothing had happened.
Intel enginners were some of the last to be affected by this mysterious illness, and when it struck, there remained little choice but to shutter the plant.
Seventeen months passed, and the lights of the Intel factory remained dim. Offerings by Cyrix and AMD began to overtake Intel's flagship 486 processor.
Suddenly, the enginners began to regain unconsciousness one by one. Strangely, they all had a similar vision while under the illnesses grasp. They begain to call each other on the telephone, comparing notes on what they had 'seen'.
Cautiously, they began to draw plans - plans that would save the great Intel from ruin.
Work went quickly, as each enginner 'knew' what the others were thinking. Soon, the plant was reopened, and fabrication of of the new design began. The engineers collectively decided that the chip would be called the "Pentium". Asked a short time before his unseemly death, an enginner said, "It just HAD to be named that. I don't know why. But we all agreed."
Sadly, the chip that propelled a limping Intel into the forefront of CPU technology was the last that any of the 'Pentium' designers saw to fruition.
Tragedy struck the enginners as they were on their way to the company picnic. The bus that they were riding in plummeted off an embankment into a river, drowning all of them.
Gordon Moore's famous 1965 observation was voted into law in 1994, one year after the release of the new chip. The punishment for violators is death by mysterious circumstance. No one has yet broken Moore's Law, and woe be unto those that do.
Thanks,
Jonathan Frakes
P.S. In your ear, Mr. Smarty-pants.
I DONT WANT TO BE ANY SMALLER!!!!
I'm very happy the way I am now, thank you...
-- You are in a maze of little, twisty passages, all different... --
The basic computing element will of course keep getting smaller and faster, until it reaches certain physical limits which cannot be exceeded. At this point, a new paradigm will be invented to provide the way beyond the limits.
How small can something be? It can be down to the molecular level. How fast can something go? Up to the speed of light. So eventually the fastest "transistor" will be composed of individual molecules, with changing states caused and communicated by light (photons).
Electricity was stated in the article as "the way" that information will be input and extracted from tiny transistor, but I think this paradigm will change! Once you get to a certain speed and smallness, electricity loses its ability to transmit information. This happens due to sluggish time response properties of the medium (capacitance and inductance and other jazz) and wave interference and delay of the electrical wave of electrons flowing.
Once a wavelength (directly related to frequency) becomes a certain fraction of the distance it has to travel, the electrical path becomes a "transmission line" instead of a "lumped element." Basically you are trying to send waves of electricity (1's and 0's) down the line too fast for the physical capabilities of the medium. So that's one more thing that complicates the process of making computers smaller and faster--getting the information out and transmitting it to other components.
That's why I was mentioning a new paradigm...because I was thinking of reading Isaac Asimov's stories that mentioned his ultimate computer, Multivac, which filled up miles and miles of space underground. He extrapolated the ideas that made the cutting edge computers of his time into what he thought the future's computer would be like--namely, huge. But of course he couldn't predict the advent of the transistor and later the microprocessor which changed everything and made everything shrink instead of getting bigger....by the way--some parts in computers, like the connectors and traces, are already becoming speed bottlenecks for some of the reasons mentioned...
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.
A huge element of Si technology's success is the way lithography allows mass production. The problem with molecular schemes is that they involve pieces that have to be added to the substrate. William's approach of using crossbars as the basic element gets around this problem somewhat. But Si + lithography is still going to be a more robust technology.
There is also the problem that molecules are delicate objects. You simply can't make millions of molecular switches and expect them all to work. With Si all the switches work often enough that you can make chips. Williams plans on using fault tolerant architectures to get around this problem.
So, HP's program isn't as crazy as a lot of stuff I see at conferences. But it is still far fetched, and I think it will fail because it is competing with Si VLSI instead of aiming for some niche.
Si technology is damned good, and trying to compete with it has been a losing game for decades now. (e.g. GaAs and Josephson junction computers). "Novel" technologies pay off when used for an application for which Si is unsuitable (optics with GaAs, magnetic field detection with Josephson junctions).
However, I will eat my hat if in 20 years (10 years after Moore's 'law' bottoms out) VLSI is done in anythin other than Si.
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*****"I think we've picked the winner, something that will allow this thing we call Moore's Law to continue on for another 50 years. I used to think it was impossible. Now I think it's inevitable."****
This seems to be a stretch of the imagination. Moore's law defines, specifically "the number of components per integrated function" doubles every 12-24 months (is historically slightly more than 24 months), but is also (perhaps improperly) used to say that performance of processors doubles in that time.
In any case, following the progression of Moore's law from 1965 to today and through for the next 50 years reveals a minor (perhaps major) flaw in this scientist's assertion.
1971: 2,250 - Intel 4004
1982: 120,000 - Intel 80286
1993: 3.1 million - Intel Pentium
2003: 55 million - Intel P4 Northwood
2013: 1.76 billion
2023: 56 billion
2033: 1.8 trillion
2043: 57.6 trillion
2053: 1,840 trillion
The atomic diameter of an average old atom of some metallic element that would be used in transistor fabrication is about 10^-10 meters. The atoms in their molecular "crossbar" technology would be much larger, plus inter-atom spacing of about 0.3nm... we can assume there would be an element every 1nm.
With 1.84 quadrillion elements per component, we're talking 42 million components on a side, assuming uniform density and perfect 100% usage of space on the atomic level, these chips are just about half a meter in size.
Ok, so I proved myself wrong! Moores law has the TECHNICAL possibilty of holding true for the next 48 years. Beyond which, atomic structures themselves make the process of shrinking the components all but impossible.
Stewed Squirrel
There are 10 kinds of people in the world. Those who understand binary and those who don't.
The catch is, it's a lot easier to make money selling silicon (or diamond, or DNA, or nanotubes, or whatever...)
You know, alot of people talk about the death of moore's law, but uh, has anyone ever considered the possibility that moore's law might keep going and going and going ad infinitum?
It isn't impossible. Theoretically when you get down to quantum computers where your using atomic mater itself your almost at the smallest possible size for computation, until you break down the individual peices of the positrons and electrons into quarks and gluons which could possibly be used for calculation, then you think about creating an artificial black hole and stuffing ever more matter into a singularity and you could calculate the universe from something the size of the head of a pin (especially if you adhere to the multiverse theory, which states there are infinite realities). If there are infinite realities, we could litterally collapse our own reality, and possibly others nearby into a singularity for calculation, and just keep on going and going and going.
Truly as we begin to see the emergence of quantum computers we start to head towards these paths for higher and higher calculations, instead of knowing a universe around us, abit at a time. We could know it all at once, in all it's enormousness. We could then know and create others (computation being equivilant according to babbage, a computer simulating a reality perfectly is in fact a new reality as our reality is nothing but mathematical laws anyhow).
While I know moore's law can fail us at any time now being a theory and not a fact. Dismissing it as most do so casually after it has perservered time and time again for so many decades running is really getting to be rather ridiculous.
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
#!/bin/csh cat $0
This goes to the heart of Moore's Law. Moore's Law isn't about transistor size per se. Rather, it's about the number of components that can be built on an integrated circuit at minimum cost.
In his original paper, Moore examines the effects the defect density (the number of defects in the silicon per unit area) and the size of the chip have on the economics of chip production. As you make larger and larger chips, you can put more and more transistors on them. However, the wafers have unavoidable defects in them; a physically larger chip is therefore more likely to contain one or more of the fatal defects, and be worthless.
Moore's key insight (and one that is usually overlooked) was that at any given level of technology (i.e., lithography or transistor size) there is an economically optimum number of components (almost exclusively transistors, today) per chip--that is, a number of components that minimizes the manufacturing cost per component (see the first figure of his paper). If the chip is too small, you spend too much time handling and packaging too many chips, driving up costs; if the chip is too big, the yield is low due to the wafer defects, and costs are driven up again. Crucially, Moore noted that this economically optimum number of transistors increases markedly over time, as integration technology improves; this led to his more famous second figure, showing the base 2 log of the number of components per integrated function growing without bound over time (and doubling every year, a slope that has since been reduced to doubling every 18-24 months). What is unstated in the figure itself is that this represents the economically optimum number of components per integrated fuction.
So the short answer to your question is that a chip 3 inches on a side could be made, but the yield would be so low, due to the unavoidable defects in the silicon wafer itself, that it would be fabulously expensive. It would be cheaper to make several smaller chips perform the same function, which is what is done today, if you stop to think of how many different chips are in the average PC.
Moore's paper is a marvel of prognostication; he notes in it, among many other keen insights:
He soon got his "flexible techniques for the engineering of large functions" by the invention of the microprocessor; the use of automated design techniques for digital circuits is, of course, now commonplace.My computer is chock full of molecules already and it's quite dependent on them for it's functionality.