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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
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.
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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.
HP technology has always been my number one choice for helping me tolerate defective chips...
Actually its both, with more quantity, comes more fault tolerance, and with that comes better quality. When modern silicon has half a billion transistors you have to prepare for some of them to not work if you ever want to have a usable product.
There is truth in humor.
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.
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.
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*...