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HP Introduces Defect-Tolerant Nano Elements
versicherung writes "With the ever shrinking feature size in microelectronics it will soon be prohibitively expensive to manufacture defect-free nano elements. HP has come up with a new way to produce fault-tolerant microchips. Utilizing mathematical techniques borrowed from coding theory, HP will be able to produce those chips by using a cross-bar architecture and adding 50 percent more wires as an 'insurance policy,' to fabricate nano-electronic circuits with nearly perfect yields even though the probability of broken components will be high."
Does that mean that the phrase "thats not a bug thats a feature" will now be an accepted marketing term? Untill true nanofabrication becomes available this will become the standard thruout the industry. Now the question, is there a copyright on fault tolerent circuts? Prior art anyone?
"It's so convenient to have a system where everyone is a criminal" - A. Hitler
To me, this sounds like quantity over quanlity, in order to get these things to work. Hey, whatever works I guess...
If you don't want someone to copy something, don't give it to anyone.
Now if only they still made chips, like the Alpha or PA-RISC, it might matter, but since both architectures are toast, why are they even researching this?
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When they do fail, HP will claim it's not their fault and we'll have to tolerate it.
Wouldn't the cost be the same. Say 50% more wires= 50 % less errors, but you still spend 50% more on the wires there, so you would still break even because even though your yeild is 150% of the original, the chips will also be 50% more costly because there's 50% more wires in it.
Seing as how about half of all produced microchips have to be tossed for defects, and many advanced manufacturing methods are prohibitive because of the inability to produce defect-free chips, I'm sure that a lot more companies than HP will have a strong interest in this.
:)
Imagine being able to jump to a lower-micron manufacturing process far earlier because you don't need perfection. Intel and AMD would love that.
"This wallpaper is killing me. One of us has got to go." -- Oscar Wilde on his deathbed
Once the defect rate is low, the extra 50% more wires will just take up unnecessary space and increase production costs. But for now, it seems completely acceptable to up the production costs and size in order to get yields higher.
This kind of concept is already in use throughout the rest of the microprocessor world - Intel (maybe AMD too, I dunno) has extra cache lines in their microchips, and they deactivate defective cache lines, and reroute them to the "spare" lines to improve yield.
The Doormat
If you're not outraged, then you're not paying attention.
Not all chips are CPU's. Besides for a CPU you don't want to waste a lot of transistors on redundancy. This is obviously made for minor chips that don't produce a shitload of heat and don't need to go any faster.
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Maybe because they can use it for other chips than CPUs, maybe they can sell the technology to others, maybe they have other plans...
I'm still curious as to what chips HP manufactures these days. I'm guessing very few if any. With the cost-cutting they've done cheaping out on their employees across the board, the fact that they would still have people researching IC manufacturing is a bit baffling.
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
Capt'n I'm rerouting the .... Wait never mind it did it all by itself....
Okay all fixed. I guess you don't need me anymore, I'll just go and get drunk in the corner.
I hope they can apply this tech to LCD displays, which are like giant-area microchips. The yield on LCD batches is low (only maxing at 60%), because defects come per cm^2, (mostly) regardless of transistor featuresize. One (or a few, depending on the QA of the manufacturer) defect can spoil a whole unit; more area means more chances of spoilage. If HP's redundancy means a pixel has two chances to survive defects, the yield might multiply greatly, as the odds of two defects in a single pixel's area is very small. Huge LCDs, like those that might cover a wall, are practically impossible to make without defects. This redundancy might enable them, while slashing the prices. I'd love to see the day when my "desktop display" returned the size of my "desktop" to of my 1x2m desk, rather than 17" diagonal of my notebook.
--
make install -not war
Even if they totally went out of the CPU biz, getting royalties from Intel, AMD, IBM, etc, is still income.
There may be more to this story than HP is leading us to believe. First of all, why is HP releasing this information? Is it to give other chip makers a heads up of what HP is planning in the near future? I think not. This story sounds more like a cover-up rather than an explanation.
Valkyrie is about to die! Wizard needs food -- badly!
I wonder if you could bypass the adaptive technology and try to over clock a processor based on this.
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HP technology has always been my number one choice for helping me tolerate defective chips...
Children,
Before there were computers, people sometimes checked the accuracy of their arithmetic by "casting out nines" (google for it). When computers were big things full of vacuum tubes that had the tendency to go out in the middle of a calculation, people used parity-checking to ensure the integrity of the calculations. Coding theory has come a long way since then , with new schemes for different applications, such as crypto and telecom (from TFA). The principle is old, but I'm sure these guys had to come up with some clever ideas to apply to the problem at hand.
The increasing use of spare circuits could let product makers offer variable-performance, gracefully-degrading products. As the product degrades it would map out the bad circuits, but keep functioning. An overclocked GPU might be specced to have 16 vertex shaders, come from the factory with 18 working and then slowly lose them over time (but not drop below 16 during the warranty period). Used long enough, it might steadily lose vertex shaders until it can no longer function.
For example, I wish my ATA hard drives would let me access all of the space on the drive, including spare blocks tagged for remapping of bad blocks. A flexi-capacity drive would show higher-than spec capacity on first install and then gradually degrade. Standard practice of never using 100% of a available space would guarantee the availability of at least a few spare blocks. Current drive logic fails the drive once the spare blocks are used up, but a smarter drive would keep working by steadily shrinking the drive capacity. The OS might show this as a steadily-growing, locked "BAD_BLOCK" file. A well-used hard disk might last much longer, but shrink below rated capacity and still function adequately.
A dynamic version of this technology would be a real boon to over-clockers. Say you buy a heavily multi-cored CPU (guaranteed to have at least 32 of 40 fabricated cores functioning). It might come with 35 of the 40 fabricated cores working at design clock-speed. Over-clocking might knock out a few cores that were marginal but let the system's user optimize the speed of the cores vs. number of usable cores in realtime. A fully dynamic self-testing, self-healing system might automatically bring marginal cores back online once the clock-speed is dropped.
I realize that companies currently sell the same chip with different ratings by testing for speed or usable components (e.g. usable vertex shaders in a GPU), but what I want is different. Rather than use spares to guarantee some fixed spec performance (the current industry practice of leaving only a fixed set of available good components active on a chip), users could enjoy both more initial performance and longer life from products using a dynamic self-testing, self-healing system that uses all know-good components. Such systems would gracefully degrade as vertex shaders, disk blocks, RAM cells, or cores die or stop functioning at high speeds and temperatures.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
sorry but what does china have to do with this ?
some people are questioning whether this is worth it. remember that nano-circuits are experimental and techniques like this are necessary just to make working circuits.
'crossbar architecture' is an experimental architecture that, using carbon nanotubes laid out in a grid with selectively chosen connections, allows you to perform useful functions, such as logic. HP recently (a few months ago) announced the crossbar latch, which they claim will eventually eliminate the need for transistors.
Unfortunately the technology is far from mature; it's slow, difficult to manufacture, and unreliable, although it is ridiculously small (the primary advantage). This research is an attempt to correct the problems associated with difficulty to manufacture and reliability; rather than try to make a perfect circuit using nanowires, build in some redundancy and you're fine.
If you want to know whether this sort of design is acceptable, ask whether CDs and DVDs are acceptable. They are founded in coding theory, and are designed to have many bad bits, and yet still contain perfect information.
Well, do you think internet protocol is inelegant? If you have to send information through a noisy channel where one in every 10^3 bits gets flipped, you need some mechanism for error correction or you simply can 't communicate.
Now we're not talking about communication channels here, but the analogy is the same. There are some factors we as engineers can't control (such as thermal noise, for example) and so we have to work around them. I won't get into the technological details of nano-fabrication right now, but suffice to say the problems are very difficult. And since these are nano-wires, extra area barely hurts you.
That's the key; nano-circuits are miniscule... like two or three orders of magnitude smaller than the transistors we can make right now. Extra wires are no problem.
Can we get some naked hippies on this dangerous development, stat?
It Is the Nature of Information to Transgress Artificial Boundaries
What happens with components that are not "bad" but are "on the verge" and can go bad any minute? Something tells me that there will be a lot more of those in a chip where "bad" components are perfectly fine. They're impossible to detect, too, because during QA they'll work perfectly fine.
I see this tech as a temporary crutch for something more advanced - self diagnosing and self-healing chips. Now that would be frikkin' cool.
Brilliant deduction there.
My mom says I'm cool.
Actually most of this work has been going on throughout Carly's reign. She took over in '99, HP's first patent on the stuff was issued in 2000.
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HP Nanotech web page
And the design itself has already been covered here a few times...
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/02/
The research had probably been going on long before Carly arrived. The biggest connection you could draw between the two is, she didn't axe it during her reign...
-- *My* journal is more interesting than *yours*...
When you hamstring your profitability by increasing your per-chip costs by altering the basis for the architecture and adding superfluous components, "yield" no longer has the significance it was invented to relate.
By the time the learning curve decays, it could be cheaper just to throw away bad parts in the old technology than to modify new ones in the new one.
Yep, many of HP's actions are quite baffling. With Fiorina in charge, they gave up on PA-RISC, spun off their test & measurement division into Agilent, and basically became a printer and white-box maker.
If this is the path they've chosen, it seems like they should get rid of all these researchers (maybe Intel might want them), and just concentrate on making printers and PCs. Of course, their PC division doens't seem to be doing so well against Dell, so maybe they just should dump that too and just make printers. It's the only thing they're any good at anymore.