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MIT's Hybrid Microchip To Overcome Silicon Size Barrier
schliz writes "MIT researchers have successfully embedded a gallium nitride layer onto silicon to create a hybrid microchip. The method could be further developed to combine other technologies such as spintronics and optoelectronics on a silicon chip. It is expected to be commercialized in a couple of years, and allow manufacturers to keep up with Moore's Law despite today's shrinking devices."
Arthur: What do you mean, an african or european gallium nitride layer?
Bridgekeeper: Both! That's why it's an hybrid!
Arthur: I didn't know that! Auuuuuuuugh!
Unless the figure out a way to make plastic stronger, I think cellphones shouldn't get much thinner or smaller.
> "...despite today's shrinking devices."
It's not the size of the device, it's how you use it.
It's been getting interesting these past couple of years to see chip manufacturers not only content with observing the results of Moore's Law, but working hard to actually meet it as a self-imposed deadline. Would Intel have come as far as it did recently if Moore had never put his famous observation onto paper?
to go with todays shrinking devices. Watch in a few years everyone will be humped backed with T-rex arms.
My mind went straight to breast implants after I misread the title as being about the silicone size barrier.
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of those... in my smartphone.
Eventually the smartchip in your credit card will get bored, nano-build a wifi connector out of the card's polymers and connect to the net, building its own Facebook page and getting more friends than you have. And then Skynet wins teh interwebs.
i should get my girlfriend to use silicon to overcome her size barrier.
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
Let me guess, the user name will be your card number, and the PIN will be it's relationship status?
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
Leave it to the guys at MIT to find that. I guess if you do enough 'research' on silicone sizing, you'll find the barrier.
They aren't talking about shrinking existing MOS transistors (which make up 99.999% of digital circuits); which is what Moore's Law talks about. They're talking about the ability to integrate transistors with better matching characteristics (CMOS is terrible at it) for analog and photoelectric circuits onto existing silicon. This idea has been done again and again from Intel's hybrid silicon laser to Silicon Germanium, which is already widely used in cell phone chips.
This won't make digital circuits smaller and isn't a solution to it so the headline isn't accurate. What this will mean is that potentially, cell phones won't need 4-5 separate chips for RF, digital, baseband, etc. You can integrate all those functions into one. But again, that's nothing new. IBM already provides BiCMOS with a SiGe layer on top for analog circuits. It's not been economical since it usually lags behind their bulk CMOS process for digital-only chips.
And it's status line will be "In a relationship with NigerianBride419"
I hate printers.
"We think heterogeneous integration will allow us to keep up with Moore's Law in terms of performance enhancement rather than device scaling,"
So this really won't make the cores go any faster or reduce the number of flaws that would allow manufacturers use larger areas on the wafer without reducing their yields. But it does show potential for interfacing high speed RF circuits with the cores on the same chip.
The real question is going to be, "how is memory design affected by the hybrid substrate?" In the multi-core era bigger faster memory is one of the single largest stumbling blocks to general computer performance.
Well, ok, it is. But in my day we called them chips. A micro was a microprocessor. So unless you were talking about a microprocessor chip, using the word microchip marked you as a clueless non-technical luser of the sort that writes the science articles for the local paper. Now get off my lawn, uphill both ways, in the snow.
None of them can see the clouds; The polished wings don't care.
Would Intel have come as far as it did recently if Moore had never put his famous observation onto paper?
James Burke talked a lot about the phenomenon of the exponential explosion of technology in his Connections series. Many others have commented about this as well. (Toeffler, Vinge, Kuzweil, to name a few) Technology often makes other technology easier, so you have an exponential chain reaction. Moore's law is just a consequence of this acceleration of technological advance in a highly technical field.
I am also reminded of a chip industry quip: "Gallium Arsenide, the technology of the future! Always was, always will be!" I hope that finally becomes wrong!
It will just become one plastic blob, with the circuitry embedded right in the plastic, and being semi immune from bending fatigue breakage. No board and separate case in other words. I guess they'll need a way to do the sim card, but perhaps they can do with with bluetooth.(or some other shortrange wireless tech). Charging the blobbed batt will be inductive. Pros are sturdy, weather proof and most likely pretty cheap, cons, no user serviceable entry at all without some serious leet dremel skills and a microscope and so on. But really, if they can get them cheaper than even now, along with much higher resistance to breakage, most people won't care about getting inside the thing anyway.
I hear a lot about the "exponential" growth of technology. I'm not sure whether technology is really growing exponentially, but I do know this: exponentially growing processes don't go on forever - they can't. Rather quickly, they hit upon some underlying limitation in the physical world, and progress stops. I think it's much more likely that growth in technology follows a logistic curve, which grows pseudo-exponentially for a while, but then plateaus. We're just in the steep part of the curve right now.
Nitronex has been doing this for years.
http://www.nitronex.com/
Oh sure... silicone vs silicon gets +funny
but point out that the story is tagged "coleslaw" and some wanker marks you off topic.
Boy, it's a good thing this guy's theories, demonstrated to have great predictive value, are being followed rather than a politician's theories about the impending Moore's Law crash.
It's why I create karma in the first place.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
The video screen would be a sheet of paper; audio just the earphone, text input just the keyboard etc. The power source is the other barrier. Batteries are still bully and less than an order of magnitude more efficient than a century ago. Smaller computing device would shrunk the power need, but the interface consumes lots of power.
In the more distant future the interface would bypass the senses and connect to the nervous system.
Step 1 is to get her to overcome the virtuality barrier.