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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
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...
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.
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.
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.
Not all circuit boards are glass fiber.
Ceramics are already used where you need precision e.g. wave guides.
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
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.
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
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.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
I don't know if it's used for copper interconnects (I've been out of that business for years). It might work pretty well - the resistivity is twice that of Aluminum, which will slow down your interconnect performance some.
It's not wasting time, I'm educating myself.