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IBM Dipping Chips In 'Ionic Liquid' To Save Power
Nerval's Lobster writes "IBM announced this week that it has developed a way to manufacture both logic and memory that relies on a small drop of 'ionic liquid' to flip oxides back and forth between an insulating and conductive state without the need to constantly draw power. In theory, that means both memory and logic built using those techniques could dramatically save power. IBM described the advance in the journal Science, and also published a summary of its results to its Website. The central idea is to eliminate as much power as possible as it moves through a semiconductor. IBM's solution is to use a bit of 'ionic liquid' to flip the state. IBM researchers applied a positively charged ionic liquid electrolyte to an insulating oxide material — vanadium dioxide — and successfully converted the material to a metallic state. The material held its metallic state until a negatively charged ionic liquid electrolyte was applied in order to convert it back to its original, insulating state. A loose analogy would be to compare IBM's technology to the sort of electronic ink used in the black-and-white versions of the Kindle and other e-readers. There, an electrical charge can be applied to the tiny microcapsules that contain the 'ink,' hiding or displaying them to render a page of text. Like IBM's solution, the e-ink doesn't require a constant charge; power only needs to be applied to re-render or 'flip' the page. In any event, IBM's technique could conceivably be applied to both mobile devices as well as power-hungry data centers."
For an ionic liquid there should be no charge.
That's a pretty garbled summary.
... does it have electrolytes?
As a non-hardware engineer, I am not sure I understood the article, but would this make it possible to literally hard-code software to improve performance? I.e. a logic board having some standard components and a "changable" chip that could improve performance of much-used software?
but there have been so many "IBM new revolutionary technologies" during the (recent) past years nobody has even been able to see in actual life, let's hope this one makes it up to the shops in a reasonably near future...
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
The really important things that were not mentioned are:
I like how this post seems to just sum up every Slashdot comment ever without actually saying anything.
I personally prefer a salsa based dip.
... we have to rethink the term "solid state."
I like how this post seems to just sum up every Slashdot comment, ever.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Did somebody say gel packs ? .
...wouldn't this lead to exploits that are currently considered impossible due to the volatile nature of RAM? I'm thinking of something along the lines of those guys who jailbroke a mobile phone by putting it in a freezer. Not that this would be an insurmountable problem, but it is something to think about.
Rob
This reminds me of our meatbag bodies and homeostasis. Instead of waiting for electrons to come flowing down the wire transistors can draw electrons from surrounding 'Ionic Liquid'?
Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
...they'll rebuild it using bionic liquid to make it better than before. Better, stronger, faster.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
I have a shot of ionic liquid every day.
Always go for the double-dipped ones...
For the bitter aftertaste.
I'm going to run out and dip my chips in Corinthian and Doric liquids to see what happens.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
The track record of this type of technology has not been good. Ovonic device have never seen any significant deployment. They change state via an electric pulse that heats a cell and causes it to change between a crystalline and amorphous form. The cell holds the state without power consumption, and reading the value requires very little power.
The HP memristor is similar. The energy pulse moves oxygen ions in titanium dioxide which changes the conduction properties of the TiO2, which is a semiconductor. This has not hit the market so far either.
The IBM ionic liquid is even farther away from deployment. All they've shown is a phase change. They haven't even figured out how to do logic or non-volatile memory. It's interesting research, but nothing more so far.
Why is Snark Required?
..i'ts got electrolytes.
You're my personal hero.
hmm dipping chips must have given them good tast!!!
The researchers freezing the phone weren't doing it for anything as trivial as a root exploit; they were doing it to break the filesystem encryption. Freezing the phone (with it switched on) slows down the RAM decay enough so that quickly (~0.5sec) popping out the battery will reboot the system without the RAM erasing. From there, they start the phone up into "fastboot" mode, which is a pre-OS state that allows the device to be attached to a computer and have a custom OS loaded. That OS sniffs the RAM for the keys that had to be stored while the phone was on and decrypted, bippity boppity bacon you have access to the AES-scrambled filesystem. It's a nontrivial exploit and also nothing new, low-temperature data remanence is a known weakness of cryptosystems in general.
http://www1.cs.fau.de/frost
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley