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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
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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...
"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?
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No, its not. Theres a pretty huge difference between changing logic and simply lowering frequency by a range of dividers.
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
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=04/07/30/22025When a web server is /.ed, will it mutate into some kind of Dawson's creek trapper keeper?
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?)
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?
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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.
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."
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"
True for PCs, but an IBM server isn't anything close to a PC. considering almost all IBM i & p series servers are shipped with multiple deactivated processors as well as seperate processor cards to handle raw IO processing this is more of a RAID type thing. The purpose of RAID isn't to prevent the drive from failing but allow you to limp along until you can swap the drive. Also, remember that the IBM "big iron" has hot-spare, hot-swappable EVERYTHING...CPU, RAM, PCI cards, controllers, disks...
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.)
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.
The future is here!
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