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NASA Building Massively Heat-Resistant Chips
coondoggie writes "NASA researchers have designed and built a new circuit chip that can take the heat of a blast furnace and keep on performing. Silicon carbide (SiC) chips can operate at 600 degrees Celsius or 1,112 degrees Fahrenheit where conventional silicon-based electronics — limited to about 350 C — would fail. The new silicon carbide differential amplifier integrated circuit chip may provide benefits to anything requiring long-lasting electronic circuits in very hot environments such as jets, spacecraft, and industrial machinery. In particular, NASA said SiC applications will include energy storage, renewable energy, nuclear power, and electrical drives."
This gives an update for my macbook pro.
Its too bad, we could have used this when the Pentium 4 Prescott came out...
All your 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 are belong to us
As I read all I could think about was...overclocking
is hundreds of champagne corks popping simultaneously at the AMD campus.
In case you didn't know, Apollo has been developing a system to grow diamond wafers through CVD (Carbon Vapor Deposition) for you guessed it, semiconductor use.
Anyway SiC is used in jewelry too (obviously with the same properites), just never realized that it could be used to make microelectronic devices like this. Heh, my wife's engagement ring just got way cooler.
Georgia Tech, the leader in Chia(tm) technology.
This could help my girlfriend
Every time she tries to use a laptop, it melts because... she is so hot.
Maybe you should take her in for repairs. If the battery is from Sony, you may risk serious fire damage.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_noise
TFA talked about an analog amplifier. As such, noise is a problem. The higher the temperature a circuit is operated at, the greater the noise. For some low noise applications, it is standard practice to run an amplifier in a liquid nitrogen bath. For most applications, room temperature is ok from a noise standpoint. The temperature TFA talks about would produce about three times the noise of a room temperature circuit. For many applications, that would be way too much.
For some applications, high temperature operation would be hard to avoid. Landing a probe on Venus comes to mind in that regard. The extra noise induced by temperature should cause lots of engineering misery.
Also, do SiC transitors switch as fast as doped silicon? Otherwise the "make a pentium with it!" ideas might fall flat.
"You saved 1968." - Ms. Valerie Pringle to the crew of Apollo 8
600 degrees Celsius or 1,112 degrees Fahrenheit
I love those "pull-significant-digits-out-of-my-ass" unit conversions.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
Ah, the moderation conundrum:
Should this be +1 Funny for using the words "my girlfriend" in Slashdot, or does the lameness of the other joke cancel it out?
Freedom is the freedom to say 2+2=4, everything else follows...
Presumably the chip has to sit on some type of circuit board, connected to other components.
So it's OK if the chip survives but the rest of the circuit melts?
Terrorists can't threaten a country's freedom and democracy. Only lawmakers and voters can do that.
Maybe we can finally get a decent lander or rover on Venus.
Venus darling, Please don't get alarmed, but those wretched Earthlings have made a super-dooper hot-stuff control whatsit. You'd better watch out because from what I hear that super-hot atmospheric condom of your's isn't going to protect you from frequent and repeated penetration much longer. Sorry to be such a harbinger, but I just thought you ought to know. Haved a chat to Mars, he knows all about what they get up to.
It's nice and all but will we be able to build a fanless PC from it? Although I'm not sure how fast the PC would operate if it could be allowed to get that hot?
Now the chips which will execute the
distanceInFeet = distanceInFeet + deltaInMeters;
calculation are heat resistant.
(Hey, only kidding guys. I mean, we all make mistakes. Of course, I don't expect you to be rocket scie... oh, wait. Well, its not like you had ten billion dollars of... oh, wait. Well, the point of it is, you can still make mistakes.)
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
"20 years ago, I wouldn't have even thought to question NASA's work, but their track record lately invites such abuse."
You underfund the agency and expect huge rewards? We dumped so much more money into NASA back in the days of the spacerace and we as a society benefited from hundreds of technologies that today we take for granted.
I am not saying NASA shouldn't be watched for spending....but you can't expect an agency to perform if you don't give it money.
This may not be a huge accomplishment, but being able to withstand higher heat means that you can keep your current cooling apparatus the same and simply allow the chip to run faster (and hotter). Yes, the heat still needs to escape, and there may be other problems with implementation, but you have to take that first step first.
Have they got a carrier or other method of holding it to a circuit board that will stand up to that heat? Speaking of, have they got circuit boards that stand up to that heat? And obviously solder can't be used. So how will they interconnect? Glass fiber may melt at higher temps, but I'll bet the optical properties distort well before then, considering it glows when it gets hot enough. Not to mention they have to make the emitters and receivers withstand that temp as well.
Kinda like flight. Or going faster than 20 miles an hour. A little engineering thinking makes it easy to get around the pressure problem: Let it be "wet" not "dry" No need to maintain 1 bar in a pressure vessel, now is there? Of course, the other components have to handle the heat, too, not just the chips.
Why even have a heatsink?
Slashdot "libertarians": Small government for me, big government for those I disagree with. -1, I disagree with you
So, when are we getting these in workstations? Although, my current laptop tends to get pretty hot, I don't think I would want 1600 degrees on my nuts
Heat-resistant nuts are their next project.
Table-ized A.I.
high temperature boards are ceramic (AlN, Al2O3, HTCC, DBC, etc.) seeing as how they're fired from 1-2000C, they'll be ok.
silver-glass die attaches are okay up to 400-450C. Beyond that, you have high-temp brazes, AuIn, AgAuGe, AgCu, oh and AuNi ok up to 950C.
Circuit!= computer. Chip != microprocessor. SiC chips = power electronics switch or sensor components. sure, you could build a processor out of these, but you could also just go back and build a Pentium out of vac.tubes.
It's a wide-bandgap semiconductor material that is being extensively developed for specific power or harsh environment applications. There currently are no MOS devices (used in your PC). Switching speeds typcially in the kilohertz range, for power conditioning. That chip is a single transistor, about the size of the piece of silicon in your PC. Finally, silicon's only okay to 150-200C. The article should have said 350F, not 350C.
read and learn. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_semiconductor_device
Intel re-released the Pentium-D line, using this technology.
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
the limiting factor with Si is infact the packaging AND that is going to be the limiting factor with SiC operating temp as well
;)).
NASA are right in saying that Silicon can operate at 350C but that is the exposed die that isn't on any substrate and using spring-point connections
Start packaging the thing up and you have the die solder down onto something, solder wires onto the die and it is these things that put the operating temp at 125C
Semikron have IGBT modules that they say can operate upto a die temp of 175 simply because they have got a method of not using solder to bond the die down and they use spring-points todo the electronic/electrical connections all allowing the temp to be risen
Sure SiC "may" be able to operate at some nice high temps BUT there are NO!!!! packaging available to take advantage of this!!! and thus the max temp comes crashing down to the nice 175 (or 125 depending if you can/cant use some of the more advance bonding methods)
This is again all pie in the sky stuff anyway... The problem is SiC is a bitch to grow and their yield is very low due to micro-piping occurring in the wafers making them useless.
Not only that they have only just been able to make a switch!!! SiC diodes have existed for a few years now and for custom modules you can get an inverter brick with SiC diodes and they have only just been able to make a JFET out of SiC that is low voltage/current/switching-speed....
So much so that quite a few semiconductor makers have invested alot into diamond (cause when it grows it grows just as good as silicon, just slow... oh they aint figured out a way to dope it yet
you could also just go back and build a Pentium out of vac.tubes
I gotta tell you. I just did this. What a difference! It has this quality that's hard to describe. A kind of warmth that I just don't get from silicon transistors.
Now hardware capable of running it is finally available, Duke Nukem Forever should be released any day now!
pretty cool, getting moded flamebait in a thread about an IC chip that'll run in a blast furness!
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
The traditional challenge is to get the melting point of solder low enough. The worry about moving to lead-free solder is "how will we keep the melting point down." It is the silicon chip that is the delicate component
that is damaged by heat.
Ofcourse the low heat tolerance of silicon chips, by limiting permitted temperatures during manufacturing, also limits required temperatures. No-one requires circuit boards to withstand more heat than the components can take. So some materials that sheltered behind the poor temperature resistance of silicon chips are out, but there is no fundamental problem.
Since Venus's surface temperature is about 460 C, these chips would presumably work on the surface of Venus, which would allow for long duration landers, or even rovers, should we want to do that. I think of Venus, "Earth's evil twin," as being a very interesting planet, but there has never been very much interest in exploring it at NASA.
The only pictures we have of the surface of Venus are from the Venera landers. (These USSR Venus landers were all inernally insulated and weren't designed to last on the surface more than about an hour; since the data were relayed from the fly-by bus spacecraft which was only in range for about that duration, there was no point in doing more.)
Remember the 'McGuffin' in Zardoz?
It was a diamond based processor.
In fact it was a diamond based, optical processor...
Hmm... Things that make you go hmm...
Oh, for people who don't know, 'McGuffin' was Alfred Hitchcock's name for a central plot device around which everything in the story rotated.
And for people who don't know who Alfred Hitchcock was, he was a famous movie director.
Its not easy getting old. There's all this common 'shared reference' shit to worry about losing.
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Adjusted for inflation, NASA's funding is about half what it was in 1966. And about 50% greater than the trough in the late 70's. The current budget is over 16 billion USD this year. That's a lot of money. We can whine about how underfunded NASA is. But until they start spending their money better, it's not going to change. About a quarter of that is spent on the Shuttle and ISS. Namely, an obselete launch vehicle with huge overhead and an underperforming research station in LEO that would be underperforming even if it were complete and fully manned.
My take is that unless NASA (and US Congress) makes major changes in how it does things, then any funding throws good money after bad. For starters, I believe NASA should use US commercial launch vehicles (Delta IV heavy, Atlas V heavy, Falcon 9, Minotaur, etc) rather than develope its own. Nix the Shuttle, Ares 1, and discontinue the ISS construction. There might be a use for the ISS in orbit though maintenance is rather pricy (over a billion a year in USD last I heard). Expand NASA's unmanned part. I grant that there's certain things that become easier to do with heavy launch vehicles (eg, Ares V) so it might be worthwhile to develope such a vehicle. Personally, I doubt that is necessary. If NASA were to encourage investment in US commercial launch ("seek and encourage, to the maximum extent possible, the fullest commercial use of space" is Congress's first stated directive for NASA) rather than sabotage it.
NASA could run a real space program on its current funding. The money it squanders on various make work projects (eg, all those potential shuttle replacements that never happened), the pointless manned space projects (the Shuttle and ISS), and the expensive R&D on a rocket that can be provided by the commercial world (the Ares 1) could buy a lot of commercial launches.