Slashdot Mirror
The Death of the Silicon Computer Chip
Stony Stevenson sends a report from the Institute of Physics' Condensed Matter and Material Physics conference, where researchers predicted that the reign of the silicon chip is nearly over. Nanotubes and superconductors are leading candidates for a replacement; they don't mention graphene. "...the conventional silicon chip has no longer than four years left to run... [R]esearchers speculate that the silicon chip will be unable to sustain the same pace of increase in computing power and speed as it has in previous years. Just as Gordon Moore predicted in 2005, physical limitations of the miniaturized electronic devices of today will eventually lead to silicon chips that are saturated with transistors and incapable of holding any more digital information. The challenge now lies in finding alternative components that may pave the way to faster, more powerful computers of the future"
...believe it when I see it!
You're thinking small. Why miniaturize the laser, when we could instead enlarge the sharks? -John Searle
[R]esearchers speculate that the silicon chip will be unable to sustain the same pace of increase in computing power and speed as it has in previous years.
In the meantime, other researchers will figure out ways to make silicon work smarter, not harder.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Didn't we essentially already talk about a processor replacement with Graphene? It wasn't that long ago that such a thing was posted....although I don't know anything about it from a truly technical standpoint whether that is viable or not.
I've been hearing this claim every few years for the last 25. Remember optical computers in the mid-80s? How about gallium arsenide? CRAY-3 anyone?
And of course what's really reaching a limit is not the CPU's, but our ability to use them effectively. See "TRIPS architecture" on the wiki as an example end-run around the problem that offers hundred-times improvements using existing fabs.
Maury
Well, we use most silicon to display boobs, might as well repay the favour :)
Overclocking might be fun as well: "Hey, I managed a stable DD at room temperature!"
liqbase
I remember reading about the death of silicon in the 1970s...
(Okay, dating myself here, but still...)
welcome our new FASTER graphene overlords
Let's think, a technology that has taken 60 years to go from lab to today's level, it's going to be superseded in five years by technology that has not yet made a single transistor or gate. Hmmmm..... Meanwhile silicon is not going to be improved in any obvious way, such as with ballistic-transistors, gallium-arsenide, silicon-carbide, 3-d geometries, process shrinkage, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc.... No soup for you.
we must find a way to pay our salaries and secure our jobs through the recession, I know get out the ol "Silcon is Dead" article and dust it off, that should last us 4 years
Yeah, I saw a yard gnome once, it didn't scare me - Space Ghost
How about cars are dead, over cars are on their way
G
Right so the article goes to say silicon only has 4years left
YET then go on to say they just need to find something to replace it
WTF!!!!!
Thats like saying that petrol's days are numbered we just need to find something to replace it
Intel's CTO Justin Rattner just gave a talk at Cornell two days ago; he covered this topic carefully and confirmed that Intel has the technology and plans to carry out Moore's Law for another 10 years on silicon. Technologies such as SOI and optical interconnects will be leveraged to hit this.
It's not necessarily the size of the transistors that make chips hard to make these days either (although they are now giving us huge problems with leakage current). It's harder to route the metal between these transistors than it is to pack them onto the silicon. New processors from Intel and AMD have areas with low transistor density just because it was impossible to route the large metal interconnects between them. Before we can take advantage of even smaller transistors we'll need a way for higher interconnect density.
I don't know any numbers, but I think I can safely guess that the computer processor business is just a fraction of the whole silicon chip manufacturing business - maybe not a small fraction, but still. And the rest of the industry doesn't need extreme speeds - there are microcontrollers, integrated buffers, logic gates, comparators, operational amplifiers and loads of other $0.05 crap you got in your toaster oven, blender, wirst watch, remote-controlled toy car, printer, Hi-Fi, etc., etc. And there is an obvious priority for those: cheap and reliable. So the silicon is not going anywhere.
This is Slashdot. Common sense is futile. You will be modded down.
There's no way my silicon based chips are on the way out, where do these people get this srtoqa sdj asfjvsv oiasfj jkkj&^$______-........... *no signal*
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Me: Hi Intel, we can either build you a chip 10x faster than the competition or 10x cheaper.
Intel: we'll take cheaper please
This guy is confused. The BIRTH of the silicon chip is nearly over... now is when it will completely take over our environments. To put it another way: demand for silicon chips is as dead as demand for crude oil, corn, or other staples.
stuff |
This should really be tagged software, shouldn't it?
While we're at it, might add that Duke Bend'Em Forever tag, too...
I'm an infovore...
Wake me when they announce the death of the Slashdot dupe
Beauty is in the eye of the beerholder.
This has been getting bandied about every time someone comes up with a new, spiff-tastic technology/material to build an IC out of.
"THIS COULD REPLACE SILICON! WOOT!"
Yet it keeps NOT happening. Again, and again (and again).
The trailblazers keep forgetting, the silicon infrastructure has a LOT more money to play with than a given exotic materials research project. And, in many cases, what's being worked on in exotics can be at least partially translated back to silicon, yielding further improvements that keep silicon ahead of the curve in the price/performance ratio. Additionally, we keep getting better at manufacturing exotic forms of silicon too.
So, until silicon comes to a real deal-breaker problem that nobody can work their way around, I SERIOUSLY doubt that silicon IC is going anywhere. Especially not for a technology that has taken several years, and recockulous amounts of money simply to get a single flawless chip in a lab.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
The transistor was first patented in 1925 (look it up in Wikipedia) and the integrated circuit in 1949 - both fundamental for microchips - but we still use radio valves today, and not just for nostaligic reasons. Silicon will probably hang around for a long time to come, I think.
For something else to replace silicon it will have to not only be better, but so much better that it will justify the investment, or it will have to offer other, significant benefits, like being cheaper to produce, using less power or being smaller. Of these, I think speed is probably the least important, at least for common consumers.
Personally, I still haven't reached the point where my 3 year-old machine is too small or slow - not even near. It wouldn't make sense to upgrade, simply. I think most people see it that way, they would probably be more interested in gadgets than in a near-super computer.
Even if the hard limits of silicon circuits are reached in four years, we will NOT be switching to nanotubes, graphene, superconductors, or quantum computing. Any of those technologies are at least a decade away from commercial applications, and 15 years is more likely. If there's nowhere to advance after four more years (and I rather doubt that--we've got too much history proving us wrong), then we'll just grow out. Bigger silicon dies, bigger cache, more cores. Maybe we'll actually hit the terminus of Moore's law, but that won't stop computers from advancing, and it won't magically make any of the alternative technologies mature.
When someone makes a nanotube 80486 that I can buy and use, THEN I'll start to believe we're close to a technology shift. Hell, give me a 4004 - at least it's a product.
Bottom line: We're not there yet.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
Most of the posts above are true about silicon sticking around a while longer and being improved in other ways, but Moore's Law cannot hold true for much longer with silicon. Transistors can only get so small. Features certainly cannot get smaller than one atom, and we're already looking at features that are 5 atom layers thick.
And no matter what you do to silicon, electrons and holes are only going to move so fast through it, and you're only going to be able to fit so many transistors in a certain amount of space. Something will have to replace it. Vacuum tubes had a nice long run too, but when they hit their limits and silicon was ready, silicon took over.
Semiconductor Research Corporation, the people who make the roadmap for all this stuff and have all the technological problems already laid out, say that it'll be a decade or so, not 4 years. But there is a fundamental limit that we are going to hit soon. Charge mobility and atom size are not really adjustable when you're stuck on a certain material.
have been greatly exaggerated. - (signed) The Silicon Microchip
Let's wait for the future... =)
-- Fernando F. Linux User #263682 http://desconstruindo.eng.br
I think an important point raised is, that the death is not a comsumer death, it's a death in silicon chip research, the ventures into making them faster will stop, since it's simply not the optimal path for improvements, and instead the reasearch will focus on using some of the previusly to costly paths that are now becoming more attractive since they don't offer as many problems when downscaling size and upscaling speed.
... why don't we call Nanotubes and superconductors The Microprocessor Killers (TM)?
Tie two birds together: although they have four wings, they cannot fly. (The blind man)
Although I'm no expert, I've been reading that one reason Solar photo-voltaic panels have not dropped in price is due to the fact that much of the silicon used to make them is tied up in chip fabrication.
I wonder if those same silicon wafer production facilities can be converted to make solar panels once the move away from silicon in the microprocessor industry takes place?
If this is true, then the players who are overly committed to silicon may lose ground to those moving to new materials and technologies. It could portend quite a shake up.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Silicon scaling will run out. We will reach a point where we can no longer make working circuits any smaller, but it will NOT be in the next four years. 45, 32, 22 nm circuits are already in the lab. 16nm (which may be the limit,) is expected to be in production by 2018 (10 years from now.) After 16nm, quantum tunneling may be a problem. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/16_nanometer
Intel thinks we may hit the limit by 2021. http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9584_22-5112061.html
While I agree that silicon chips are not going anywhere soon, there are applications where they are not the most suitable to use. Most of the critical infrastructure that powers most advanced nations today utilize silicon chips in one way or another. Strategically planned attacks on such infrastructure that utilize EM pulses could seriously cause widespread disruption. I'd like to see new technology that is resistant to such attacks. I believe carbon nanotube based technology is resistant to EM pulses.
I know I'm being a little pedantic, but Silicon is NOT the most common element in the Earth. It is the most common element in the CRUST of the Earth. The most common element of the Earth is Iron. The Earth is an impure ball of iron oxides.
Silicone != Silicon
...until Netcraft confirms it. Long live silicon!
You all have Oo.o and Firefox, so get World Wind.
SciAm is running an April 2008 article on graphene, so here are my notes on graphene fabrication. This is pretty neat, and worth some amateur experimentation. You can make the AFM/STM for ~$100 USD. As for graphene, there are some instructions on that page for chemically synthesizing it, or just use pencil graphite and write over a piece of paper. Another cool idea is figuring if we can use mechanical force to use a very thin pencil tip to write a circuit. JohnFlux in ##physics on freenode mentions that resistors could be used as a poor man's piezo, just heat up the metal (or perhaps pencil) and it will move. It will move very slowly. But a start.
...because the top speed has barely moved in the last decades. The commercial airplane is dead because the top speed has gone DOWN after the Concorde landed. WTF? If we really hit the hard limits of silicon, then there won't be half a dozen techs for terahertz speed waiting. It might mean that the next generation WON'T see improvements of many orders of magnitude like we have, that's it. Computers will be something that operate at some given performance and the world will shrug at it. In short, the world won't collapse if this completely uncharacteristic development comes to an end. And even then I suspect it will go on elsewhere, did you see flashmicro's 900GB 2,5" flash disk? Yes, at ungodly prices but I think we have a long way to go yet...
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
The trailblazers keep forgetting, the silicon infrastructure has a LOT more money to play with than a given exotic materials research project.
Not to mention all the money already invested in manufacturing infrastructure for silicon based devices. As long as the industry can keep utilizing that infrastructure in a profitable manner it will do so. They won't begin to move away from silicon in any major way until it becomes unprofitable for them to not do so.
gallium arsenide was a reasonable technology to pursue at the time. It had teething problems, was expensive to manufacture, and ccc ran into funding problems related to a drop off in defense spending after the end of the cold war. That is not to say that Gaas was a completely foolish technology for the time. There are many reasons to believe that it offered faster switching times, and smaller module packages than did ECL logic of the time. CCC was putting out a 500mhz machine in the early 90's, four years before ECL machines hit that speed, and six years before cmos could.
Of course, wire delays started to become a concern for multi-board processors, and cmos began to deliver enough transistors on a package that out-of-order superpipelining became possible, and the performance advantage of a slightly higher clocked ecl/gaas processor evaporated. This is not to say that there was not a good six-seven year window of opportunity for gallium arsenide, while cmos was still pretty feeble. I'll also point out that gaas has continued to be used in specilized applications like serdes, high-speed signal-drivers, and cell-communications drivers. You're never going to get millions of mesfets on a chip, but they work really well, if you need a few dozen really fast drivers.
As for trips, and a lot of other designs like it, it essentially is working on the problem that modern cmos introduced. We have more transistors than we know what to do with, but we can't drive them any faster. I've seen some clever designs that are very good at solving one type of problem. I have yet to see a design that solves the problem in the general case, and with minimal change in the programming model. A lot of smart people are working on the problem, however, so I suspect that something will come about; It may not happen quickly, however.
I'm getting really sick of Slashdot spinning articles about possible future technology into "The Death Of (current technology)."
Some very intelligent researchers at the Institute of Physics' Condensed Matter and Material Physics Conference came to some very intelligent decisions about the future of CPU's... but this is hardly the end of the silicon chip.
In addition to some of the points made by other posters (Silicon CPU's will live on in smart systems, cheap systems, handheld systems, etc.), there is a whole world of silicon chips that are *not* CPU's! Analog and mixed signal circuits need highly linear devices--not just switches that turn on and off--which current silicon technology provides wonderfully. Our current analog design technology has nowhere near exhausted the possibilities on the tapestry that ten/twenty year old silicon fabrication technologies provide.
Maybe graphene, nanotubes, or the Next Big Thing will change the high performance CPU niche, but silicon still provides everything we can manage to use for the rest of the IC world.
Besides, I bet that graffiti will be quite a challenge with nanotubes.
>> Standing on head makes smile of frown, but rest of face also upside down.
Seems to me that the new advancements in diamond manufacturing will pave the way for diamonds to be the next step.
Great articles on it...
http://www.geek.com/81ghz-diamond-semiconductor-created/
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.09/diamond.html
Slew
Since the mid-80s the demise of the silicon chip has been predicted. Back then there were all kinds of articles about how 100mhz was the top end of silicon chip performance. Gallium Arsenide based chips were supposed to be the chip of the future. At that time, GaAs chips were mainly used in military applications. I remember articles in Byte and Scientific American, among other magazines, about this. Now look at the performance levels of silicon. Where's GaAs? Never underestimate the enginuity of engineers. Never underestimate their optimism either. Apply to silicon and GaAs respectively.
Oh man, I was hoping germanium was going to make a comeback as a semiconductor. It holds up better when its hot, IIRC from my college days. I'll just have to make a lot of retro guitar effects pedals.
Isn't Moore's Law from the mid-60s, not 2005 as cited in the summary?
Insofar as I can recall, what is being reported there is not a '350Ghz chip' as you would imagine in the sense of a processor, but the maximum switching rate of a small batch of transistors for use in radio communications. At speeds that high I imagine you would start running into very hard problems in an actual processor, like the speed of electricity not being high enough. Although I agree with you in principle, the example is not a good one. Hopefully my example is, but I'll confess that I didn't do the maths.
This statement:
...the conventional silicon chip has no longer than four years left to run... [R]esearchers speculate that the silicon chip will be unable to sustain the same pace of increase in computing power and speed as it has in previous years.Does not equal this statement:
Hardware: The Death of the Silicon Computer ChipWhat the first statement means is that they may have found something faster than silicon chips. That doesn't mean that silicon will suddenly "go away" just because it cannot maintain Moore's law predictions.
Hell - do you think they're going to put some uber carbon nanotube processor in your TV remote or your microwave oven control panel? Silicon cpu chips have *plenty* of uses other than high end mainframes. They're damn useful - that's why they're everywhere.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
It's hard to call the end of the reign of silicon when we don't even know who the heir apparent is yet.
That's kinda of like saying the sequel to Duke Nukem Forever is going to be the best game ever.
The individual transistors may be approaching a limit that, in theory, could be passed by other materials. But silicon still has plenty of potential.
For starters we're still using a primarily two-dimensional structure on the surface. There's no reason you couldn't build your structures in three dimensions through a cube of the material. (Yes power and cooling become issues, but they're soluble.)
Going truly 3-D again shortens the wiring, leading to another speed increase with a given speed of components. More importantly, it enables tightly packaging an enormous number of components - and potentially a diversity of them for specialized tasks. This is applicable to problems that can be divided and distributed.
Power can be drastically reduced by switching to asynchronous, or partially asynchronous, designs. Alternatively it can also be drastically reduced in a synchronous design by using a looped/crossed-over transmission line clocking system, which recycles most of the energy of each clock pulse into the next, so the supply only has to make up losses rather than throw it away and start from scratch every cycle. Either requires upgrading design tools (to handle data-as-clock or massively-multiple clock phases respectively). But power saving aids capability and speed increase.
That's just two places it can advance. There are no doubt many more. (Especially once we're down to the place-every-atom level, where quantum-weirdness becomes more of a tool, less something you have to fight as in variable-cluster-of-atoms designs.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Thats when I'll believe the replacement is at hand.
hath we forgotten about good 'ol gallium arsenide?
We wouldn't even need faster chips if they just removed the bloat from Windows!
---scott
Check out Robocode in VB.
Sure it will. Right after Linux takes over teh desktops.
/snark
Those computer chips are pretty damn small. I guess its a problem for laptops, but I could fit probably, hundreds of those little intel processors inside my desktop case and it isn't even that big. If they are running out of room the obvious solution is to just make 'em bigger maybe I should become a computer scientist
If the tech required to make memory from nanotubes is open to all, then it will happen much more quickly than if one company owns it and licences it out to others (assuming they might license others). Silicon, even at the limits of the material, will remain strong and dominant for most uses simply because it would remain relatively cheap and open to innovation by anyone. I remember how IBM's PS/2 with its Micro-channel architecture as to be the future of PCs. Sure, it was very good tech for the time, but the 'open' PC architecture that immediately preceded it saw much more rapid innovation and was - and remains - the dominant path for innovation. Micro-channel was surpassed....and is now obselete.
Only boring people are ever bored.