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Nanotech in Microchips by 2015
dotwhynot writes "Molecular electronics, a realm once considered science fiction, could be heading for our computers and devices sooner than thought.
A new report on the technology roadmap of the chip industry finds a growing confidence in new nanotechnology, and forecasts that the transition to the post-silicon era could happen by 2015.
The development of nanoswitches has already reached a point where it will be possible to manufacture them reliably at low cost. Intels goal over the next decade is to build chips that hold more than one trillion switches."
I thought the ipods already had this technology!
Everything seems like it's "nanotech this" "nanotech that" these days... It seems like "nano" stuff in microchips should already be here. Marketspeak = the big let down.
-Jesse
Nothing says "unprofessional job" like wrinkles in your duct tape.
Still, predictions that a nascent and unproven technology will sweep into widespread usage within a decade seems just a bit optimistic. I just hope that I'm wrong.
The transition to new nanotechnology techniques could occur around 2015, when chip makers will have exhausted their ability to shrink the wires and switches that make up the modern processors and memory storage devices at the heart of the computer, communications and consumer electronics industries.
Nevermind the growing heat concern. Who was it that said soon microchips will be hotter than the surface of the sun if they keep getting faster at the same rate they are now?
Bradley Holt
Let me be the first to coin the term "picotechnology". I don't know anything about it except that it will be sub-molecular electronics.
Hooptie
"Heavens, it appears that my weewee has been stricken with rigor mortis!" -- Stewie Griffin
I'll believe it when I see it. These tech predictions rarely seem to happen when people think.
"Armed forces abroad are of little value unless there is prudent counsel at home" - Cicero
the 80's and 90's. Next will be "pico technology" and then after that "femto technology". Quick, trademark those names!
First dibs! It'll be the "in" thing, well, after I'm dead. Aw, shit!
One of my "life goals" if you wish to call it that, is to get into the engineering and design of circuits/robotics/etc. I've looked at taking some nano-technology classes but right now I don't feel it would be justified compared to learning other important things which will contribute to what I want to do.
Don't get me wrong, I'd love to take some courses to learn about it, but at my local schools atleast, their programs aren't that great it seems. Any insight about what would be the best way to approach nano technology other than a small college, or would you consider the college courses afterall?
$fortune
Tomorrow has been canceled due to lack of interest.
The transition to new nanotechnology techniques could occur around 2015, when chip makers will have exhausted their ability to shrink the wires and switches
Shrinking the wires can ALREADY be done with carbon nanotubes. Already some of them are being used for heat dissipation in audio chips.
So, IMHO, it'll be more or less like this:
1) Carbon nanotubes will replace copper wires in CPU's, disminishing the required operational voltage and current leakage.
2) "Conventional" technologies used today (like multigate transistors) will be optimized for nanotube wires.
3) The first nanotube transistors will appear a couple of years after 2) is developed.
4) As this technology is improved, one day we'll be able to use spintronic or optical transistors.
Somewhere in the middle of these, 3D-layered chips and massively-parallel computing will be developed. Oh yes, don't forget about the system-in-a-chip.
A (redudant - read my past posts on the subject) glimpse into the future: In 20 or 30 years our computers will be smaller than a Nintendo gamecube. No floppy disks, just flash (or magnetic?) memory cards and solid-state HDs. PCI bus will be cast into oblivion, when the new add-on cards fit in a PS2 memory stick. Small future, indeed.
... nano in my wafer. You got your wafer in my nano.
Intels goal over the next decade is to build chips that hold more than one trillion switches.
Floating point errors performed at the speed of light!
If big boobed women work at Hooters do one legged women work at IHOP?
we'll have flying cars...
No one cares what your captcha was
Houston TX, USA
...has already reached a point where it will be possible...
I don't understand what this means. Are they doing it now? Haven't we reached a point with everything that it will eventually be possible?
And there was me thinking that microchips manufactured on the 65nm scale was nanotech.
I have never let my schooling interfere with my education. - Mark Twain
computers were so big, we'd call them desktops.
...will be then fixed... too bad we have to wait 10 years for this.
Better brush up on the 'ol binary.
If big boobed women work at Hooters do one legged women work at IHOP?
...all the techs that are in widespread use and far superior to those that were predicted in Sci-Fi. You know, like the collection you're using right now to read this.
Those massive meathooks appear to only have three fingers and a thumb each!
Seeing as how short most careers in IT are most of the readers here will have have finished their career in computers by the time this happens.
threadeds blog
Nah, they'll become us. Or I should say....we'll become them.
As it is now, I 'lose' my Thinkpad (in the couch cushions, under a coffee table book, etc.) about once a week. I'd hate to think of a system that I lose in folds of my flesh.
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
Will not happen at least for another 30 years if it even happens at all. The nanotube technology is here now, but designing useful components will still take time, as well as a decent fab process. Then you have to convert (intel, AMD, IBM, etc. factories to fab these devices). This will cost billions and billions of dollars to do, and they will only do so, when it is deemed profitable. Let's not forget that the driving force behind adapting new technology is profit.
This may never even happen. There are countless other possibilities for nanotubes, and the main problem seems to be just what exactly do we focus on using them for.
Does anybody remember how long it took for the transition from QWERTY to Dvorak to be completed? Oh wait, it never happened! You can consider the transition from Silicon fab to Nanotech to be much the same.
Oh.... I get it, you're from the lo-tech enclave set up by our Voryonite Overlords - that small patch of land back on planet Earth where people have been kept oblivious of the arrival of our Lords and left to develop on their own, the aim being to convince even the last sceptic that the arrival of our Lords has been a Good Thing (tm).
How cute, so you've got internet now. Do you also access it through neuralites or are you still using external equipment? I'm sorry, I'm a little out of touch - I haven't watched the OldWay Feed since I was very little... anyway, must run, a Triunian Starhopper has just docked, I need to fix some of their computer systems. A starport, even a remote one like Venus V, is a great place to be when you're a nerd
See ya! And do drop by once you develop space flights, I'll get you really good deals on antimatter!
I've always heard that chip design since they went sub-micron in the early 1990s wasone of the first, great examples of nano-technology.
So, now when programmers say there are "bugs" in the system, we know they mean nano-bugs; and we can all look forward to nano-viruses that will follow. Get me a can of NANO-RAID, please!
will be finished by 2016. It needs this huge chips to be able to start in a little bit less than forever (-:
My wife's sketchblog Blob[p]: Gastrono-me
CreatureComfort's girl robot: lol no its not a virus
Drakken to something and calls it 'nano'.
His assitant:"What does nano mean?"
Drakken:"Small, mini, tiny, minute."
Assistant: "why don't you just say mini?"
Drakken: "because nano sounds a thousand times better, why else?"
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Just don't slow down when you see that big dip in the road.
/the landing is a bit rough, but hey, you wanted to fly.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Meaning: "We've figured it out, but we can't actually admit that Moore's Law is complete toast. We like making you upgrade every 18 months."
would my positronic computer be able to talk to them? :-)
THANK YOU for your submission of a new
[x] nanostructure
[ ] laser
[x] transistor
using
[x] large molecules
[ ] DNA strands
[ ] silicon
This is a bad idea, because
[ ] a 3-D structure is difficult to heat-sink
[x] scientists likely never will produce a transistor this way
[x] silicon has unique properties that cannot be matched
[ ] this is a case of outright fraud
The problem however is not to make circuits
[ ] out of lasers
[ ] 3-D
[x] from anything but silicon
[ ] self ordered
But the problem is to make them
[x] reliably
[x] at low cost
[x] faster
Further this article was published in
[ ] Science
[ ] New Scientist
[x] NYT
[ ] Science News
which is primarily a publicity-seeking instrument, and not a great peer-reviewed journal of physics.
I can say this because I have a
[ ] BS
[ ] MS
[x] PhD
in
[x] Physics
[ ] Electrical Engineering
You still nede to fix computer systems? how...quaint.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
..."spintronic"...
:)
Admit it, you made that word up.
No, I didn't
Maybe someone will solve the fabrication problem but these articles haven't even talked about it. Until someone makes the transition from the statistical mechanics of photolithography to the molecuar mechanics posited by nanotechnology devices, the fact that feature sizes of electronics devices are on the order of nanometers is insufficient justification to claim that we're on the verge of the nanotechnology revolution.
Seastead this.
Do you understand how many dead transistors there are in a modern CPU? We already have [b]huge[b] fault tolerant abilities in microchips.
Mod parent up +1 Geekiest comment ever made on /.
Flying cars and you still use Slashdot, bah.
I suppose that's to play GTA on it, right? :)
With the pace at which technology is growing and (hopefuly beyond moore's law soon) the fear of buying a new computer is extremely high for middle income computer nerds. There is always something better up ahead. Just a few months ago I bought an X800 graphics card, supposedly the world's fastest graphics processor chip (few months ago), by now its almost going close to crap. With nanotechnology and a 'trillion transisters' on a single chip, we should not only anticipate a great leap in raw processor power and speeds, but also an overwhelming increase is in the rate of growth itself.
:P
I can see a time not very far away when a computer buyer would say to another buyer 'so you still wanna buy the latest 1 Terahertz Pentium 7 system released today?.'.. 'Nah, dude, I think i'm going to wait a 'few hours' for the 3 Terahertz system to come out'..
Do we, really? We have ECC and selectively disabling sections when we know they don't work, but do we have a scheme where one faulty transistor in the core itself will never affect operation? (Compare to how ECC might promise you no data loss desptie a n-bit error within a word.)
Bill's weapon was originally micro and soft. In his old age he has been downgraded to nano and it is no longer possible to measure for any degree of stiffness.
Mork says Bill's got a "nano nano"
Bill says "I am trying to reach pico status"
W1nd0z3 1s fa d0rks
Also every other year, some new meaningless buzzword like oh, just picking one, "nanotechnology", invades every nitwit's predictions. They don't know what it means, you don't know what it means, but it sure sounds cool, whatever it is, and it gets four breathless pages in "Wired".
Meanwhile the real advances usually come out of left field and take over.
It's gonna happen soonish, however it will, like all new technology, be buggy and expensive as fuck.
Women- the final frontier...
I Agree. I think you could draw an anology between current predictions on nanotech and predictions about nuclear applications in the 1930s or space travel in 1950s. Nanotech is promising, but it is impossible to tell what we'll see in 15 years.
In 1955, people standing on the moon in spacesuits within 15 years seemed just as likely/unlikely as having a collony on Mars, battling the Russians from earh orbiting satelites or launching spacecrafts with an atomic motor. Who would have thought we'd mostly loose interest in manned space flight shortly after pissing on the Moon?
Here's a dark vision on the future of nanotech, biotech or whatever hyped techs we've currently: First applications for may revolutionary technologies are in WARFARE. Carbon-nitrogen chemistry didn't solve starvation through fertilizers, but gave wealth to Alfred Nobel selling dynamite. Nuclear plants only followed after the atomic bomb's "succes". Computers have roots in WWII. Arguably, the ubiquitous communications and sharing of knowledged provided by the internet, cell phones and physical transport vehicles have enabled (some of) the terrorism we see currently. And though an all-out worldwide cyberwar is unlikely, internet has (yet again) not closed the gap between rich and poor, wealth and hunger, world peace, whatever - I digres.
It is not hard to imagine military applications for nanotech. A dirty bomb filled with nanofibers with asbestus-like properties should be just around the corner. And IMHO a bunch of undetectibly small spy bots is more foreseeable than a trillion gates on a chip.
...the oil runs out, causing the global economy to collapse, so no money to develop these chips, nobody with money to buy them, no electricity to run them with.
New mod option wanted: -1 DrunkenRambling
I give up.
How many?