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Building Chips Like LEGO
MattSparkes writes "It seems that 3D silicon chips, allowing designers to fit more components into a smaller space, could soon be made far easier to create with a little inspiration from a classic children's toy. "Silicon wafers covered with matching patterns of Lego-like teeth and holes could aid the development of 3D electronics, say UK researchers." Crucially, this technique can make use of existing machinery."
Well, Lego (TM) could be on to a nice earner with this one....
I hope the central portions of these chips have enough space to allow cooling to be achieved.
If the stack is open, then could the cooling actually be better than a single over the top method.
This could work like the fins inside double layered home radiators.
liqbase
Now I can build little cities on my motherboard!
'Every story, if continued long enough, ends in death.' --Ernest Hemingway
You could stack some low power components for this - while current performance microprocessors won't be made this way (too much power to dissipate), there are plenty of other microelectronics which uses power in the hundreds of milliwatts range. These, you could stack 10 high.
Also, this could reduce the cost even more in the low cost market - instead of needing a PCB with soldered connections, just put all the components on top each other.
"Silicon wafers covered with matching patterns of Lego-like teeth and holes." Great... we're adding teeth and holes to our future grey goo doomsday device.
http://home.hawaii.rr.com/chowfamily/lego/
Sigs are for Terrorists.
And build my very own piratebay server (TM): http://cache.lego.com/upload/contentTemplating/LEG OAboutUs-PressReleases/images/2057/pic5F182603-C54 E-47D0-BD11-1156C6D5C655.jpg
You want to tell me that in 40 or 50 years of space travel nobody
ever cut up a picture or used photoshop/gimp to apply existing ideas
to next generation space ships?
What i remeber from my Lego days is that i ended up with (what i
personally think) a good desing, with all the wrong colours, but
with about a gazillion of unused Lego blocks. And missing Lego
blocks offcourse.
just my 2 cts.
If you don't like my sig then don't read it.
Is this cheap to do? What about capacity? Is it similar to the perpendicular discs theory that Toshiba brought to light a while ago? Could this be applied to storage solutions such as USB keys etc? Or is it more 'static electronics' such as DVD players?
ilovegeorgebush
Oh, you mean like a modified version of this?
I spend most of my time in bed, darling.
Wow, must be a slow news day. As we all know, noone has EVER stacked components in a microprocessor before..[a href = "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_circuit#S SI.2C_MSI.2C_LSI"]linky [/a]
I'm working on an electronic art project that involves circuitry distributed within 3D structures. I'd like to try different what-if scenarios given that I have some constraints to live with. My circiuts are small and simple when compared to microprocessors, but they're complex enough to be difficult on paper or in your head. Can anybody recommend 3D circuit layout software for me? OSS, or low cost are the best for me. Thanks!
What I want to know is why can't you have
lego everything? House, furniture, computer.
It could all fit together and be the ultimate
in reconfigurability.
Imagine using this for cubicles!!
sure better configurations could be made by stacking, but there is a manufactoring benifit that would reduce the costs of making chips by a very large factor. From what i remember from a tour in national semi. I was told that on a waffer of silicon they would etch several hundred numebr of chips, of which a certin precentage of of chips will have a defect(which are detected by laser optical scanners), due to the qty of transisotrs they are trying to squeeze in a square inch. so if one transistor is bad they just lost the entire chip for that transitor. (and if to many chips are lost they just toss the whole waffer) with the stacking method you dont have to make an the entire chip on the same peice of silicon. now you can partition the chip onto two seperate dyes then "lego" assemble working halfs. you could see a yeild increase as much as 25% depending on sition(if not more) because your only tossing defective partitions. thus reducing overal costs (probably enough to offset the amount to change to the lego method)
I've been hearing 3D proposals since the 1980s, but not much has come to market. Even kludges like multiple 2D chips bonded together are more common.
Two atoms are walking down the street.
The first one stops suddenly and says, "DAMN! I think I lost an electron!"
The seconds looks at him (quite concerned) and asks, "Gee man, are you sure?"
"Yeah," says the first one, "I'm positive..."
When I was a lad, Heathkit marketed an educational analog circuit-building kit wherein the circuit elements (resistors, capacitors, transistors, etc.) were encased in Lego-like bricks and connected on a Lego-like board instead of a breadboard. It was great fun - my brother and I built every circuit in the book, and then some - but unfortunately the kit interoperated a little too well, using the exact same dot-matrix as real Legos. We could sanp real Legos right into the circuits. The kit came off the market very quickly and my understanding is that the settlement with Lego contributed to Heathkit's eventual demise. Oh well.
(If anyone out there has the kit and wants to sell it, drop me a line.)
#!
which building chips like LEGO, and how do LEGOs chip??
I'm not understanding the headline here and I'm not RTFA.
This work has been going on for a long time in the market, in so far as die stacking. The problem I see with this implementation is unequal heat growth will tear them apart. (on large surface area dies) maybe not in the 10 to 20 mill range, but thinking about large areas like processor size dies, this will be a problem.
Shit wants out