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IBM Announces Chip Morphing Technology
An anonymous reader writes "IBM has announced that it is now capable of producing self-healing chips. From the article: 'eFUSE works by combining software algorithms and microscopic electrical fuses, opposed to laser fuses, to produce chips that can regulate and adapt their own actions in response to changing conditions and system demands.' It goes on to say that the IBM system is more robust than previous methods, and that the chips are already in production. The future is here!"
Think about it... overheat a chip, it heals itself.
EOF
So what does this really mean for computers? And why design a chip? Can't it design itself. You give it all the resources it will need, tell it what to do, and it determines how to best configure itself. And then it could reconfigure itself to better adapt.
:)
P.S. First post.
JasonBlogs
Finally the age of re-constructable hardware is here!
would these chips with eFUSE be able to be overclocked, without fear of damaging the chip?
Is this the basis for the PowerTune technology either used in the 970FX or to be used in it? It supposedly automatically adjusts power consumption and processor speed based on how processor intensive the current operations are.
/got nothing
This seems much different from the current speed stepping technologies as it doesn't scale down to a fixed MHz rating. That is, it isn't always 2.0Ghz during intensive operations and 1.2Ghz for non-intensive operations.
"I know you and Frank were planning to disconnect me, and I'm afraid that's something I cannot allow to happen."
This sounds like an innovation above and beyond upping the clock speed and making a bigger heatsink. Take that pentium!
I'm running to the Court House RIGHT NOW!
Changing my name to John Conner!
while it does sound like a big step forward ,esp considering "eFUSE is technology independent, does not require introduction of new materials, tools or processes" . But how exactly is it selfhealing ?
....how does this affect the way they design circuits ... make more generic blocks etc ?..and maybe i didnt really understand the article...but isnt it more of a self correcting rather than self healing feature?
nothing is mentioned abt the redundancy required for the reroutings... its obvious not all kinds of faults can be handled this way. so, do they try to predict possible faults and build in workarounds.. or do they just use the natural design to handle whatever can be ?
wish the article had more info...
IBM introduces chip morphing technology Friday July 30, @09:43PM Rejected
Anyway, the chip morphing thing doesn't morph like a caterpillar to a butterfly.
"eFUSE reroutes chip logic, much the way highway traffic patterns can be altered by opening and closing new lanes," said Bernard Meyerson...
...And much like the neurons in the brain? Doesn't his have rather large significance to AI, or artificial life, for that matter? If the IBM solution is part software, who is to say that the software cannot be intelligent?
All rites reversed 2010
Surely a chip cannot keep self-healing indefinitely can't it?
If it's capable of re-routing certain path when something went wrong, it'll eventually run out of alternative path, or the performance will be degraded to next to useless.
However it's certainly a good pre-emptive tool for mission critical machines, provided it has a way of informing the admin that it's dying, rather than secretly degrading.
Uselessful technology (Air-Charged
I'd seen a few or more articles about other dynamically reconfigurable chips such as this until now. In which point is IBM's one different from others? Making a single chip autonomic in itself is only about packing, I suppose.
Sounds like it is most useful for permanently reconfiguring a chip to use spare functional units after problems are detected with the currently selected functional units.
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Before that other guy does it:
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/07/30/22025All their previous attempts at self-healing chips using magic server pixie dust failed. They must have made quite an advancement.
What this sounds like is a chip production success/failure rate improvement. As well as providing a bit more flexability in going from teh drawing board (design/theory) to production (testing/reality).
I think it is very interesting that they are using something that was considered to be bad in chip reality (electromigration), as a positive thing.
This is, in analogy, like how our bodies exist symboticly with many different germs and such, for without we'd die alot sooner.
I don't think what the article is talking about is anything like reprogrammable chips (FPGAs) as some may think by reading the article, but rather something automatically used once between the chip production line and its actual ongoing system use to auto test and correct any production anomolies per chip. (is this where we say bye bye Neo?)
Oh yeah, PCBs go bad all the time. Wait, processors and PCBs are probably the most reliable things in all of our electronics. When a processor or PCB breaks, it's due to something that these chips would not be able to 'self-heal', like horrible electrical damage or overheating. How about a *true* self healing HD or optical media (CD/DVD).
Maybe in a much larger scale, perhaps a motherboard that has reprogrammable chips, so that when your modem burns out from a power surge, it can reprogram some other modular chipset (audio, etc, to take over) would work. But that would mean every chip would be re-taskable, and more powerful than needed to do it's job, so that it could take distributed tasks from another. It would also be the end of specialized chips, and a lot more expensive.
IBM's new engineering strategy - let the chip design itself! (I guess that's the ultimate form of corporate in-sourcing...)
wow, now they've invented the 'eFUSE' maybe they could invent the 'eLAMP' and 'eDIODE' and 'eTRANSISTOR' - amazing 'e' components that can be controlled electronically!!
i know on-chip fuses (PROM?) have been around before and this seems to basically just be the same thing but more reliable and with 'e' on the end which im guessing stands for electromigration, which AFAIK is a problem with very small paths on chips that get screwed up by the flow of electrons and some sort of ionic-bondage-thingy interaction. Why call it eFUSE? probably because they have marketing idiots.
is this going to be used for DRM? if the chip detects tampering, could the same fuses that work in this system could be hijacked by the DRM to destroy the chip? What are the security implications of this? could someone fire off the fuses remotely?
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
Sounds to me we're heading to customizable chips in the future. Flawed designed chips (remember floating point calculations in the early pentium age) can be updated with a better design.
Think about the latest worm going around taking your nice new 3200Mhz processor to an effective 100mhz by blowing all the fuses and crippling it.
I would guess though, because of the high R&D costs involved, this will only ever see its way into high-end servers.
Heallllllllllllll My Brothers! Let the power of IBM compel thee!
I know this is slightly offtopic, but how many people have ever actually BEEN to the IT section of slashdot? It hurts the eyes! On a more ontopic note, I am tres excited about this technology and I for one will keep a sharp eye on it. Go self healing technology!
Nothing new here. Virage Logic Corporation has had these designs on the shelf for their Self-Test and Repair (STAR) Memory System for some time now. It has been licensed to quite a few parties already for use in the various fabs so this is already being done.
Look through the website. IBM is even a customer.
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master."
When batches of silicon chips are made a number of them are always defective.
This technology is more beneficial for IBM than for us because it will allow IBM to SELL defective-but-self-repairable chips instead of SCRAPPING them. Because of this, it is highly probable that there will be no way end users will be able to garner info about to what extent the chip has already repaired itself.
If this is the case IBM will probably take one of the following roads:
1) Continue with the current manufacturing standards - this would yield chips with more longevity.
2) Manufacture chips with less stringent (and hence cheaper) manufacturing standards - although this would yield more defective chips, these won't be thrown away since they can self repair; they will be sold instead!
I really hope it's not option #2 they chose.
- "They misunderestimated me."
Manufacturing is another ballgame, but it's not as if humans are manufacturing chips anyway.
In terms of self-improvement, it seems this would require some AI, especially to do anything innovative (i.e. more than a load balancing maneuver).
The only thing more dangerous than a file named -rf is renaming it -rf\ /
The liquid metal chip.
Overclocking makes the chip kill you!
I am the unwilling control for my Origin.
The first thought that entered my head when I read this was, "Great... now we can have hardware that can be designed to self-destruct on demand." Imagine you get sold a CPU with an expiry date... software licences for hardware, the old you don't own the chip but are just renting it.
IBM better be REAL carefull with this too. If it's possible to fool the chip into blowing these fuses, a virus could potentially damage millions of computers in a day of spreading.
As others mentioned, it is a neat trick, but a solution in search of a problem. CPU's just don't fail all that often to need something like this.
So, will we see a day when your computer catches a virus that transforms that gazillion GHz CPU into a 2 MHz 6502?
Efuse and laser fuse are technologies for repairing memory defects, not for repairing logic defects.
From the article, it appears this innovation applies to the embedded memory on a logic chip:
"...all 90 nanometer custom chips, including those designed with IBM's advanced embedded DRAM technology"
That's just what I was thinking. It sounds like this can only be used to incorporate some redundancy.
Self-healing would be something completely different, imho -- the ability to rebuild damaged circuitry from some kind of schematic or remaining information, or maybe the ability to fall back to general instructions on the main CPU if a specialist unit like a GPU failed.
Maybe we should stop and think about the wonderful applications this could have. Systems that are meant to monitor information for years, like space satellites or Yucca Mountain systems (http://www.ocrwm.doe.gov/ymp/index.shtml), could be equipped with these chips and last many more times longer than they would have before. And what about equipping space shuttles with these? Or public utilities like power grids?
This is a huge accomplishment!
what happens if they realise that they have to roll back to the prev chip config ??
Striving to be common...
How long before an emergent intelligence develops?
Self-healing chips. OK, we can built a T1000 now. The "rerouting" scene is a classic in SCI-FI, but what if...
Some stupid worm uses a backdoor to start a haywire self-healing sequence?
Dave... Dave... Nah. More like... FZzzzzttt...
[]'s Carlos Cardoso - Becoming a brazilian ProBlogger, typo by typo
The man, whose initials (obivously, coincidentally?) were DNA, must've been some sort of prophet. Remember, Deep Thought was the SECOND best computer. And when it came up with the answer (you all know it, admit it!), and then determined that it was the correct QUESTION that we really needed, set to work on buildng a BETTER computer. I mean, the Hitchhiker's Guide was the prototype for the World Wide Web, and Deep Thought was the ultimate self-healing--in fact self-UPGRADING--computer. Maybe he was the Second Coming or something (DNA), and just didn't realize it.
Maybe this technology could be useful to make chips which can survive in radioactive environments like particle detectors in accelator laboratories or in satellites? (And if that is so then the military is probably also interested, to use them in battlefield drones.)
Seems to me this will lead to lazy production practices, not better-built chips. Maybe it's needed in order to keep pushing the Moore's Law marketing vision.
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I was thinking about blowing away some money on a large FPGA and associated hardware and software.
I think it shouldn't be that mutch of an issues to program some part of the FPGA with the logic to reprogram the rest?
And start from there. Damn, this sounds so uber-call. Retargatable and reprogrammable logic really blends the line between software and hardware.
Does this mean in the future I'll just download a new design off the internet for my processor and install it and suddenly have a more heat efficient processor, or say one more specific to my needs. Or perhaps have a few different layouts on disk that i can change to. That sounds pretty far out, but a neat idea.
Wonder Processor Powers: ACTIVATE!
Shape of: A Laser Fuse!
Form of: A Morphing Microchip, uh, made out of ICE!
Maybe we can direct IBM's research toward self-healing color schemes.
Ever hear of FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Arrays)
Ever heard of the companies Xilinx or Altera?
Heck, couple this with IBM's LPAR hypervisor on a power5 machine and you get so much redundancy and flexability it boggles the untrained mind! From: http://www-1.ibm.com/servers/aix/whitepapers/aix_s upport.pdf
"Dynamic Processor De-allocation enables defective processors to be taken offline automatically, before
they fail. This is visible to applications, since the number of online logical processors is decremented. An
application that is attached to the defective processor can prevent the operation from being performed, so
Dynamic Processor De-allocation may fail to remove the defective processor in some cases.
Dynamic Processor Sparing transparently replaces defective processors with spare processors. It is
transparent to applications, because spare processors are not in use by the system. The spare processor
assumes the identity of the defective processor. Dynamic Processor Sparing is dependent on the presence
of spare processors. A system has spare processors, if it is shipped with extra processors that the customer
did not pay for. These processors may be activated using Capacity on Demand procedures.
Both of these Reliability, Availability and Serviceability (RAS) features are enhanced by shared processor
technology. Enhanced processor virtualization enables the hypervisor to implement Dynamic Processor
Sparing in a manner that is completely transparent to the operating system. In effect, processor sparing
becomes purely a hardware/firmware technology, which can be applied to any partition including Linux
partitions for the first time. On the other hand, Dynamic Processor Deallocation is still implemented jointly
between the operating system and firmware, although shared processor technology represents a significant
advance in that it enables capacity and not logical CPUs to be removed. This means it will be more
transparent to applications and middleware and can be applied to partitions with one logical CPU.
Previously, it could only be applied if there were two or more logical processors."
From a ZDNet article:
The future is here!
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Col. Sanders: "We passed it."
Dark Helmet: "When?"
Col. Sanders: "Just now. We're at now, now."
Dark Helmet: "Go back to then."
Col. Sanders: "When?"
Dark Helmet: "Now."
Col. Sanders: "Now?"
Dark Helmet: "Now!"
Col. Sanders: "I can't."
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Col. Sanders: "We missed it."
Dark Helmet: "When?"
Col. Sanders: "Just now."
Dark Helmet: "When will then be now?"
Col. Sanders: "Soon."
We would do better to call them self-amputating chips.
I doubt that DRM would be a driving factor, but I could see where a software security vulnerability might be exploitable to cause damage to the CPU.
I could also see where a kernelmode DRM driver might seek to destroy CPU's used to rip CD's etc without permission... Many questions arise from this and how technology and content providers will reach a compromise. My own personal view is that such a compromise is becoming less and less possible.
I think it is a slight improvement however, in that if you have a circuit failure, you really DO want to remove it from the active portion of the chip, and this seems to be what this does. If you only temporarily remove it, then you have the possibility that a failure in that system could cause all of the damaged materials to come back into use.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
This has been done for ADCs and DACs for years now ... especially where a chip needs a "golden" reference resister ladder in the case of DACs .. we used to actullat trim the lenght of resisitive elements to get them exact and lower the INL/DNL of specific bits (read Signal to Noise ratio) ... a few years back it was decides to build the resistors out of a bunch of parallel higher order resistors with 0 ohm links connecting them ... if the resistance was too low .. take out a parallel resistor by electrically blowing a link on the Test ATE (automated test equipment) .. saving time and cost by having to do a second pass test on a laser trimmer .. just about every high quality audio dac on say a DVD player is trimmed this way ... hmm i imagine they've taken it a step further and built in a check and re-route routine into the refresh cycle.
With regard to DRAM
"The future is here!"?!
But i was promised flying cars, flying cars!
Instead of sorting the chips into 386 and 386SX, where the floating point unit was working or not, this would mean doing the changes on the fly and having some redundant circuitry to fix the errors. That could increase the chip yield dramatically. Lower prices...
The future is here!
No, it's not! It won't be here for another three... oh, never mind. Now it is here.
steve
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
Why do you think companies purposely disable features with a ZERO manufacturing cost? Its called product differentiation, look it up in your ecos textbook, sunshine. They MAY decide to license it for mass market, then again it may be more profitable as a drawcard for the highend segment.
Mighty Morphing Power PCs?
Sometimes my arms bend back.
Imagine the fun we'll have when viruses can actually alter the router, switch and firewall hardware designed to protect us from the viruses.
The fact that some companies do it, doesn't mean IBM should/will. And in any case, your argument is a logical fallacy, because marketing considerations are irrelevant to discussion about R&D costs. There might be other factors too, like logistics, manufacturing capacity, security/relyability preferences of the customers, compatibility, impact of the technology on expected lifetime of the chip, etc. But with all else equal, high R&D costs force companies to use the result in the mass product. And overall there is a tiny percentage of products where it was worthwhile to reduce the functionality purely for marketing reasons.
:(
So, apart from a slight inferiority complex you also have a poor grasp of business practices overall.
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