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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."
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.
The patents on Lego expired a few decades ago. They recently tried using trademark law as a work-around, by trademarking the arrangement of dots on the surface of their bricks, but it didn't stand up in court.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
If you have silicon chips that fit together like little plastic children's toy blocks, that's perfectly fine. But if you mention the word Lego - even in internal company documents - you'll have a swarm of lawyers knocking at your door. (Yes, this has happened before).
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.)
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