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MIT Focuses on Chip Optimization
eldavojohn writes "MIT's Microsystems Technology Laboratories is focusing on the manufacturing of chips as the variables that affect chip quality become more and more influential. From one of the researchers, "The extremely high speeds of these circuits make them very sensitive to both device and interconnect parameters. The circuit may still work, but with the nanometer-scale deviations in geometry, capacitance or other material properties of the interconnect, these carefully tuned circuits don't operate together at the speed they're supposed to achieve.""
variations fluctuate you!!!
Really though, this could be interesting enough if they come out with crazy fast desktop processors.
Linux Zealots: Smarter than Mac Zealots, but still zealots.
This isn't really that new. There are folk who have been looking at characterising nano-scale variability for years, and there is a LOT more to it that just the fluctuations introduced by lithographic limits. Glasgow uni's device modelling group. What's odd is that these guys are estimating the fluctuations based on mathematical models when there is pretty good data available for the 65nm technology node already.
Hmmmmmm
Ultimately this will have a limited impact on your desktop's Giggerhurts, somewhere way down the line, but it's nothing you'll notice and, for most of us, nothing we'll really understand. Unless the mathematical basis of chip-fab optimisation is your field, this isn't going to mean much.
Meta will eat itself
This isn't really anything new - shrinking design processes always make life harder for designers. Each design process (.25 um, 90 nm, etc.) has a set of rules about things - for example, how close interconnects can be to each other without causing interference.
The ruleset for quarter-micron was maybe forty pages. The ruleset for 90 nm was the size of a small phonebook. I don't even want to think about what the rules for 65 or 45 nm must look like.
Shouldn't this be a technical paper in an electrical engineering journal?
Deleted
I read the title as 'MIT Focuses on Chimp Optimization.'
Thought maybe they'd been having trouble recruiting.
We've been doing that kind of stuff at Illinois for a while.
Raise your children as if you were teaching them to raise your grandchildren, because you are.
Ever since Mabel the wonder scuba diving monkey died, Chimp enrollment has been down at all universities. Makes sense to me.n key.html
http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/S/scratch-mo
I really *love* science reporting like this:
1. The "Symposium" was "March 26-28, 2007" ( this is OLD news )
2. The MIT Team presented an invited paper that has *no* Abstract
"Variation (Invited Paper)"Duane Boning, et al"
3. The paper they presented from the article is for consumer electronics, at 65nm scale, which is basically yesterdays processor technology, ( they should ask AMD and Intel about *their* experence in 65nm fab, although they are working on digital computing silicon and not RFIC chips for digital televisons )
4. The problem they are working on is a constant battle, which everyone fights every time they shrink the channel size
Keep in mind, that silicon is *the most expensive real estate on earth*. The last time I heard about a breakthrough is when they started applying "Khachiyan's breakthrough, applying an approach known as the ellipsoid method to linear programming" to chip layout. now... what exactly is MITs contribution? Not much said, so SHOW ME THE PAPER.