Slashdot Mirror
IBM's Snowflake Microchips
Phantom of the Opera writes "The BBC reports that using self-assembled polymers and copying natural patterns, IBM hopes to have microchips that are 30% faster and consume 15% less energy. The secret? Adding a little nothing in all the right places."
What happened to the provocative, editorializing troll-summaries? How am I supposed to start a heated argument based purely on speculation? You give me what, two sentences, like you want me to read TFA? Well, fuck you. Self-assembling polymers? Copying natural patterns? Who makes these things, IBM, or CYBERDYNE? What if these get into the hands of our children? Will the next school shooting be 30% faster and 15% more efficient?
Making you think you're crazy is a billion dollar industry.
I know it comes as a surprise to no one that Mother Nature has some truly incredible engineering at work. I still, however, find it fascinating and amazing when examples like this come to light; I feel we will continue to see a lot more discoveries like this for the foreseeable future
I have two questions for Slashdot: Are there any other unique examples of learning from nature that you'd like to bring to light? And on a different note, do you think nature has perfected certain tasks and that its engineering can not be surprassed (at least in some areas), or are there things that even nature hasn't perfected?
-dave
http://millionnumbers.com/ - own the number of your dreams
Ripped from snpp:
Homer, meanwhile, uses a pickaxe to make some speed holes in his own
car.
Ned: Whatcha diddely-doin', neighbor?
Homer: Aw, putting speed holes in my car. Makes it go faster.
Ned: Is that so? Well, gee, maybe the old Flanders-mobile could use
some -- [a shot rings out] aah! [Ned collapses]
[he gets up slowly] Wow! Lucky I always keep a bible close to
my heart -- [boom!] aah! [Ned collapses]
[he gets up] Ho ho, lucky I was wearing an extra large piece of
the True Cross today. I think I'll go inside.
[a shot hits Homer's pick axe]
Homer: What keeps doing that?
Tony: I told you we should have bought more than three bullets. Let's
just grab him!
-- Louie the henchman, not the marksman, "Homer the Clown"
There is another kind of evil which we must fear most, and that is the indifference of good men. -- Boondock Saints
So, no two will be alike? Programming for them will be interesting.
Does this mean that they drop the silicon from 3 miles up and then try to catch it on their tongues?
So IBM has come up with a manufacturing method using self-assembling molecules to produce regular arrays of 20 nanometer objects on the surface of a silicon wafer with near-perfect yeild. (I presume, since "growth" was involved, it would be possible to use it to construct similarly-spaced objects of sizes within a factor of about 3 to 4 of the size they chose for this process.)
And yesterday we saw a slashdot article referencing work at Rice U, Los Almos Labs, and others, where 5 to 8 nanometer quantum dots on the surface of phovoltaic cells could significantly multiply the efficiency (perhaps into the 60% range) by efficiently creating multiple electron-hole pairs per incoming photon.
Seems to me the two are just ASKING to be combined into an inexpensive manufacturing process for high-efficiency solar panels.
Doubling to quadrupling the output of solar panels while keeping the cost in the current ballpark might push photovoltaic past the cost-breakeven point compared to grid power for rural and even suburban housing loads. And that could lead to enough production to bring in additional economies of scale and drive the price point farther.
This could be big.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
In order to meet increased demands for hype, IBM also announces the construction of a new fab for hype construction. "For a long time we hoped that we might retrofit the Cell hype fab to construct Snowflake hype, it is now clear that this new processor demands a completely new fab to create the quality and quantity of hype needed. This new hype will be so overpowering every engineer and programmer will have to relearn everything or risk being left behind. We expect our Snowflake hype will outperform our closest competitor by close to 5000%. It will also be cheaper." IBM engineer Thor Larssen stated.
Being bitter is drinking poison and hoping someone else will die
Now I am the Master!(EE)
i tor
I'll default to a "wait & see" perspective, but this has a firm basis in device physics.
One of the major speed limiting factors in microelectronics is capacitive loading. With the tiny scale of contemporary semiconductors "wire capacitance" has become the dominant delay factor. Since the wires are so close together, adjacent wires produce a parasitic capacitance effect(extra load on the circuits) similar to this.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_plate_capac
(The article on parasitic cap didn't say much)
As you can see, this capacitance varies directly with the size of the wires, is inversely proportional to the distance between them(shrinking all the time with new process technologies), and directly proportional to the "dielectric constant" of the material between them.
Air has a dielectric constant of ~1.00. Silicon Dioxide, the typical insulator in semiconductors is ~3.9.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-k
Other glass-like materials have been experimented with, but I haven't read about many successes.
So, essentially if you could "leave out" the SiO2 insulating material, you could reduce the parasitic capacitance of the wires by a factor of 3.9. Nothing to scoff at if you can actually pull it off.