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Tiny Chiplets: a New Level of Micro Manufacturing
concealment sends this quote from the NY Times:
"Today’s chips are made on large wafers that hold hundreds of fingernail-sized dies, each with the same electronic circuit. The wafers are cut into individual dies and packaged separately, only to be reassembled on printed circuit boards, which may each hold dozens or hundreds of chips. PARC researchers have a very different model in mind. ... they have designed a laser-printer-like machine that will precisely place tens or even hundreds of thousands of chiplets, each no larger than a grain of sand, on a surface in exactly the right location and in the right orientation. The chiplets can be both microprocessors and computer memory as well as the other circuits needed to create complete computers. They can also be analog devices known as microelectromechanical systems, or MEMS, that perform tasks like sensing heat, pressure or motion. The new manufacturing system the PARC researchers envision could be used to build custom computers one at a time, or as part of a 3-D printing system that makes smart objects with computing woven right into them."
Many chips that we are using today are fabricated with circuit lines that are really really tiny, to the point of nano-meter wide
For example, the latest Intel's microchip, the Ivy Bridge (and soon the Haswell) have circuit-sizes as small as 22nm
Can the PARC's laser printer churn out chips with similar nano-meter size circuits?
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
They do put other things in chips besides just computer components
of the weed they're smoking here at PARC in Palo Alto must be really good. It allows them to dream wide-open-eyed, glossing over showstoppers such as reliability and poor cost structure.
What next? Tiny chiplet sections assembled to create tiny chiplets, then the ultimate goal of assembling components one atom at a time?
TFA goes on to say it goes against 50 years of thinking. Spreading out transistors rather than putting them closer together.
They're still placing traditionally produced silicon wafers on what is effectively a printed circuit board. The wafers are just smaller. The method of placing them is new.
I don't see how spreading out parts of a system that operate in the many GHz range is going to help performance. You'll run into problems of electrons not passing charge quick enough because of that pesky speed of light thing. At 3GHz, light only travels 100mm per cycle. Electricity won't go further than 95mm in copper. Half that if you look at the speeds in parts of the core of old P4 processors, upwards of 7GHz.
re: unless they can also come up with an inkjet like process to change process chemistry on minute parts of the wafer, they will run into the same cost issues as all other process-in-memory researchers. /. like of me to RTFA, but I did!)...
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I believe that the different substrates used in the printer are manufactured separately. E.G. printer well #1 contains thousands or millions of copies of chiplet-type #1, well #2 contains only 10^3s to 10^6s copies of chiplet-type #2, etc. So these "ink supplies" can all be manufactured separately, so a memory chiplet could be made on a wafer with process physics fine-tuned for RAM production, whereas a logic or multiplexing or signal-crossover chiplet could be made on a wafer using process physics tuned for logic LSI / VLSI production. Thus the individual ink types are manufactured in an optimal manner for the type of chiplet.
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It's when the chiplets are "sprayed" or distributed onto the final substrate that the lasers are used to reposition and realign and reorient the chiplets in order to combine them into a composite computational structure. Or that's my reading of TFA (un
Wasn't Gene Amdahl trying to do this back in the late 70's? Yeah, thought so.
It has the same components as a traditional Xerox machine. There is a drum that rotates and their positioning technology put the chiplets in precise locations on the substrate. The chiplets are in a fluid that acts like toner.
It appears that the performance depends on how fast the substrate conducts signals. At this point it seems unlikely that this is as fast as an on chip connection, but there seems to be no intrinsic reason that it would be any slower then the wires that hook a chip pad to a package pin. In aggregate the speed might be faster then a circuit board because the chiplits could be closer together then chips on a board.
One possible deployment would be to use this to assemble components which are then packaged in a standard IC. It's like an SOIC, except the parts are not all on one piece of silicon.
There are potential economies of scale. With an inventory of chiplets, and automation to make the interconnect substrate with CAD, a custom assembly line can create vast numbers of different configurations and not have to include a foundry in the loop.
Despite all the naysayers that have already posted, this is a potentially game changing technology.
Why is Snark Required?
That was IBM all the way back in the early 1960s, even. Then you had Ivor Catt, before he went nuts, with http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wafer_scale_integration.
and either an "n" or an "ant" crawled into the middle of your "at" in the correction of your "lost in translation" phrase... :>)
That's 0.03 square millimeters ant [sic] 7 micro-watts per mhz. Something was lost in the translation.
Because they're not talking about rolling a dice. The plural for "die", as in a stamp or a mold is "dies"
I thought maybe they created a new technique use ants and pheremones to deliver micro-chiplets to the appropriate site. Perhaps the beginning of a new algorithm for constructing items with the chiplets using biological delivery mechanisms. If it's a military project, they might use "soldier ants"! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant_robotics
And before our eyes, a new life form is born. 3D printers = "birth machines". As a mental exercise, factor in a number of years worth of Moore's law-driven enhancement of 3-D printer capabilities. Brave New World indeed...
This coming from someone that has never worked with tool and tap dies before, obviously.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Nah, that's simply Hex. Useful if he wants to be, but disturbingly sentient at times.
Well, I might have a way, but it only works on a semi spherical planet in a vacuum.
Sure I have. I just had forgotten about them for the moment. But the little square things you get when you chop something in little square pieces? Those are called dice.
OED says that "a cubical block" in architecture, when called "die", has also the regular plural of "dies". It seems that the users of this word in the IC context take a lot of liberties with it.
Ezekiel 23:20
It's all in the architecture. It looks like these systems could be effectively used to marry custom silicon to very high frequency cores produced using traditional techniques.
Amazing stuff if it goes to production.
..don't panic