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"

Comments

I'll...

[PachmanP]

...believe it when I see it!

Re:I'll...

[scubamage]

I agree. We have the methods to use other material, but silicon is plentiful and VERY cheap. Like, the majority of the earth's composition cheap. Grab a handful of dirt ANYWHERE and a large portion will be silicon. Even if it gets replaced for certain high end hardware, I doubt silicon will be going anywhere anytime soon - its simply too affordable.

Re:I'll...

[CRCulver]

It's not as if carbon is scarce either.

Re:I'll...

[somersault]

I always wondered why those implants felt like a bag of sand..

Re:I'll...

[ScrewMaster]

I doubt silicon will be going anywhere anytime soon - its simply too affordable.

Yes, and we're so damned good at manipulating it. All this newfangled stuff is pie-in-the-sky at this point. Yes, I suppose we'll eventually replace it for the likes of high-end processors, as you say, but everything else out of silicon for a long time to come.

People keep bring up Moore's Law, as if it's some immutable law of physics. The reality is that we've invested trillions of {insert favorite monetary unit here} in silicon-based tech. Each new generation of high-speed silicon costs more, so that's a lot of inertia. Furthermore, if Guilder's Rule holds true in this case (and I see no reason why it shouldn't) any technology that comes long to replace silicon will have to be substantially better. Otherwise, the costs of switching won't make it economically viable.

Re:I'll...

[petermgreen]

I'm pretty sure the cost of the raw material is a negliable part of the costs of making semiconductor grade silicon. Most of the costs are in the very energy intensive purfification processes.

The real advantage of silicon for many years was that SiO2 was/is a decent gate materal for mosfets and insulator for insulating the metal from the main body of the IC and could be grown easilly on the surface of silicon. But afaict this advantage has dwindled as we need CVD deposited insulators for insulating between multiple metal layers anyway and as processes have got smaller there is a push to switch to other gate materials for better performance.

The main advantage of silicon right now is probablly just that we are very used to it and know what does and doesn't work with it. Other semiconductors are more of an unknown.

Even if silicon gets displaced from things like the desktop/server CPU market though I suspect it will stick arround in lower performance chips.

Re:I'll...

[geekoid]

replace 'better' with 'more value'.

For example:
If it costs 1/100 the price but seen no end users gains in 'speed' and/or 'power' it could replace silicone. It's not better at doing anything, it just has a higher value.

"All this newfangled stuff is pie-in-the-sky at this point."

hmmm, some of this is a lot farther along then pie in the sky.

Most people on /. don't even seem to understand Moore's law and think it has to do with speed and power;which is doesn't those are artifacts of the law.

Finally:
The real problem with silicone is the fabs. They are running into some serious problems at these incredibly small sizes. Some fabs are problems with metal atoms in the air, atom that are below detection and the ability to remove.

I am not dooming and glooming silicone here(although there are some advantages to hitting a minimum size) it's just that some problems aren't going away and are getting harder to deal with and the past work a rounds aren't cutting it.

Re:I'll...

[iamhassi]

"I doubt silicon will be going anywhere anytime soon - its simply too affordable."

Agreed. Besides, they've been saying this since the 90s, that silicon can't possibly get any faster and it'll be replaced very soon.

I call BS. They had 350 gigahertz silicon chips 2 years ago:
"At room temperature, the IBM-Georgia Tech chip operates at 350GHz, or 350 billion cycles per second. That's far faster than standard PC processors today, which range from 3.8GHz to 1.8GHz. But SiGe chips can gain additional performance in colder temperatures....SiGe chips, the scientists theorized, could eventually hit 1 terahertz, or 1 trillion cycles a second."

I think silicon is safe for awhile longer.

Re:I'll...

[gyranthir]

The issue of Carbon is the cost, scalability, accuracy, and timeliness/speed of nanotube production. Not the resource itself.

Re:I'll...

[scubamage]

You make some good points and I can't really argue them. As the die sizes continue to get smaller, silicon wafers must be more and more pure because tinier artifacts in the wafer can cause issues in the manufacturing process and thats going to be pretty unavoidable. However it also means that more dies can be stamped onto each wafer which should negate the number that are lost. I was meaning more that even if computer hardware is replaced with something else, things which need lower grade integrated circuits are still going to use silicon. I mean, you don't need a 1thz processor for a car's ECU, or for a garage door opener. And as more and more appliances become "smart" more things are going to need lower end chips - so I highly doubt that silicon is going anywhere. Maybe not for pc's, but everything else that is just starting to get 'wired' silicon is going to be around for a VERY long time.

Re:I'll...

[twistedsymphony]

The issue of Carbon is the cost, scalability, accuracy, and timeliness/speed of nanotube production. Not the resource itself.

What's that quote? "Necessity is the mother of Invention." or something along those lines.

Silicone was expensive to refine and manufacture at one point too. Like all new technologies the REAL cost is the in manufacturing and the cost goes down once we've manufactured enough of it to refine the process until we know the cheapest and quickest ways to do it.

Re:I'll...

[gyranthir]

That may be true, but that isn't going to change in 4 years. The replacement ideas have been around for a good while now and still productions, repetition, and scalability are still very not cost effective or scalable to even minimal production needs. And not to nitpick it's Silicon, not cone.

Re:I'll...

[Beetle B.]

Like all new technologies the REAL cost is the in manufacturing and the cost goes down once we've manufactured enough of it to refine the process until we know the cheapest and quickest ways to do it. Cost is not the main problem with nanotubes.

Nanotubes have a certain chirality - denoted by (m,n) with m and n being integers. Those two numbers define the properties of the nanotube (e.g. if m-n is a multiple of 3, the nanotube is metallic - otherwise it is semiconducting). They also determine the radius.

So far no one has come up with a way to get a nanotube of a certain chirality. They just synthesize many nanotubes and then pick manually the ones they want - if it exists in the sample. Until they can do this, the nanotube industry will not become a reality.

Re:I'll...

[Zaatxe]

Grab a handful of tit ANYWHERE and a large portion will be silicone.

There, I fixed that for you.

Re:I'll...

[gyranthir]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon

No one said anything about mass production in 1916, read the post again.

We started learning to purify it in the 1910's.

From Wikipedia:
The earliest method of silicon purification, first described in 1919 and used on a limited basis to make radar components during World War II, involved crushing metallurgical grade silicon and then partially dissolving the silicon powder in an acid. When crushed, the silicon cracked so that the weaker impurity-rich regions were on the outside of the resulting grains of silicon. As a result, the impurity-rich silicon was the first to be dissolved when treated with acid, leaving behind a more pure product.

From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_circuit
The first integrated circuits were manufactured independently by two scientists: Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments filed a patent for a "Solid Circuit" made of germanium on February 6, 1959. Kilby received several US patents.[4][5][6] Robert Noyce of Fairchild Semiconductor was awarded a patent for a more complex "unitary circuit" made of Silicon on April 25, 1961. (See the Chip that Jack built for more information.)

The first integrated circuits contained only a few transistors. Called "Small-Scale Integration" (SSI), they used circuits containing transistors numbering in the tens.

SSI circuits were crucial to early aerospace projects, and vice-versa. Both the Minuteman missile and Apollo program needed lightweight digital computers for their inertial guidance systems; the Apollo guidance computer led and motivated the integrated-circuit technology, while the Minuteman missile forced it into mass-production. These programs purchased almost all of the available integrated circuits from 1960 through 1963, and almost alone provided the demand that funded the production improvements to get the production costs from $1000/circuit (in 1960 dollars) to merely $25/circuit (in 1963 dollars).[citation needed] They began to appear in consumer products at the turn of the decade, a typical application being FM inter-carrier sound processing in television receivers.

The next step in the development of integrated circuits, taken in the late 1960s, introduced devices which contained hundreds of transistors on each chip, called "Medium-Scale Integration" (MSI).

They were attractive economically because while they cost little more to produce than SSI devices, they allowed more complex systems to be produced using smaller circuit boards, less assembly work (because of fewer separate components), and a number of other advantages.

Further development, driven by the same economic factors, led to "Large-Scale Integration" (LSI) in the mid 1970s, with tens of thousands of transistors per chip.

Integrated circuits such as 1K-bit RAMs, calculator chips, and the first microprocessors, that began to be manufactured in moderate quantities in the early 1970s, had under 4000 transistors. True LSI circuits, approaching 10000 transistors, began to be produced around 1974, for computer main memories and second-generation microprocessors.

Let them speculate ...

[ScrewMaster]

[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.

Re:Let them speculate ...

[Himring]

They can have my silicon chip when they pry it from my cold, dead, motherboard....

Not again

[Maury Markowitz]

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

Much sillio articulo

[Ancient_Hacker]

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.

Unlikely

[aneviltrend]

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.

Re:Unlikely

[geekoid]

hmmm, I trust the people I know on the floor more then someone whose job it is to say things that maintain consumer confidence.

It would be a stock hit to say "We will be replacing silcone in x period of time if X is any longer then 'right now'.

Some new technologies solve those problems. Technologies in the 'we hobbled something together proof of concept stage, not the I wrote this down on paper stage.

Some of it is impressive, whether or not there will b a practical way to mass produce it is another thing. If not, I can imagine a time in the future where only large entities that can afford 500K a chip will be using them. Or anyone at home that can afford the latest electron microscope, laser, super cooling.

meh, I'm just glad the MHz war is pretty much subsided and we are FINALLY focusing on multi-core.

Birth vs. Death

[192939495969798999]

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.

ECHO! Echo! echo!

[Chas]

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.

The personal automobile is dead

[Kjella]

...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...