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New Alternatives To Silicon May Increase Chip Speeds By Orders of Magnitude.
First time accepted submitter Consistent1 writes "A paywalled article in the "Nature Materials" journal describes the use of Magnetite to achieve ultra fast electronic switching, albeit, at the moment, only at extremely low temperatures. According to a story on Quartz, the team, led by Dr. Hermann Dürr from the Stanford Institute for Materials and Energy Sciences hopes 'to continue the experiment with materials that can operate at room temperature. One possibility is vanadium dioxide.' Chips utilizing this technology may operate at clock cycles thousands of times faster than the silicon-based chips used today."
I taught we already had gallium-arsenide transistors. The problem is cost as it is reserved for application where power enveloppe is very thin (earing aids) and switching speed is critical (telecom equipment).
Tomorrow is another day...
Only thing missing from the title to completely disqualify the article is ', scientists say.' No, I didn't bother even reading the summary.
Wow, I'd love to see some of those FTL magnets.
If this technology became mainstream, I'd bet my IBM Model M13 that people would still try to overclock the shit out of it.
There is nothing Hurr Durr about Herr Dürr.
Congrats on the breakthrough.
Back in the days, when slashdot didn't suck so bad, there were people here who would chime in with an informative comment or two.
Oh well.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
You do understand that somebody has to do groundwork before anything can be made in large scale. Even first silicon transistors where originally just proof of concepts until engineers where able to make manufacturing process around it.
Clearly I will need to use these speeds for appropriate reasons.... *coughs* I heard that fiber optics have also increased by over 20x lately.
That means that it might become feasible to crack all those pesky SSL keys (assuming that they have not been gained by coercion^W persuasion already) for encrypted communications the NSA is storing.
In the case of national emergencies, it will be feasible to search the history of politicians^W terrorists endangering the establishment^W government^W national security and come up with the material necessary for discrediting^W assassinating^W prosecuting them.
Live long and pilfer^W prosper!
I thought one of the main issues with increasing clockspeeds on processors besides heat is also the latency. at 3 Ghz a signal can only travel 10 cm anymore, and processors already have stages in their pipelines just to get the signals around. So going 1000 fasters would have to mean some major changes in how processors work i guess? since having your signal only travel 0.1 mm per clock pulse makes it rather hard to get the data around...
Are you assuming that a signal needs to be able to propagate across a whole chip for each clock cycle? Otherwise, I don't see why the speed of light should be a problem here.
There's a huge spectrum between "the sample worked in the lab" and "we can ship complex CPUs to customers in million-sized batches". Sometimes it just turns out that a process is impractical. BiCMOS was dropped after Pentium Pro. Thermal output is becoming the bottleneck for Si these days, not switching speed. Also, whatever needs cryogenics simply won't end up in your desktop or cell phone.
Ezekiel 23:20
The first working Silicon transistor was 1954 and worked at room temperature. The first microprocessors were in the late '70s. It's great that people are working on other materials for transistors, but it's a very long road from 'works in the lab' to 'ships in a mobile phone'. 20 years is not unusual.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Isn't this just another form of the problem of a room-temperature superconductor?
"These chips could operate at orders of magnitude faster than today!"
And these stories come out every other month and have for years. It's not enough that you made something really fast that switches.
You need something that operates at room temperature, that's at least as fast as silicon in terms of switching, that can operate at spaces of 10 nanometers or less without having interference from quantum tunneling effects, or rather even uses that as the switch, that is at least as cheap if not cheaper than silicon is, which is already damned cheap, and that is at least as reliably printed as silicon which is running into more and more problems, AND can operate on at least as low a voltage as silicon does now, including leaking at least as low an amount of that voltage if not preferably far less so heat doesn't ruin your device.
Silicon was the easiest, most available way to make microchips we had. And if there was another material readily available that had the right combination of everything we need, we'd already be using it. But there isn't such a thing, so we're going to have to synthesize it. And being able to synthesize some semiconductor that can beat silicon in every category, or even just enough categories, isn't easy. Maybe, maybe graphene is it, if the right semi conducting properties can be achieved. Maybe silicene is it. Maybe we'll have to develop semiconductorless switches that use quantum tunneling. What the solution is I don't know, but I do know it's not some material that JUST operates at faster frequencies than silicon. We already can do that, heck we can build an optical transistor that can operate at over ten thousand times the speed of your average silicon. But doing just that isn't nearly enough.
You all seem to have accidentally your spelling and grammar. Make no mistake, this is a problem.
20-30 years seems to be a good rule of thumb. So if you want to know what the promising technologies of the next decade will be you should look at what has been done in the lab in the late '80s early '90s. (FDM 3D printing seems to be right on the mark, and if the Oculus Rift thing pans out VR will be too. Looking at stuff from the late '90s, electric cars will have to wait another decade to get mass adoption. LED lighting is ahead of schedule. Decent adoption rates a mere 20 years after the first superbright blue LED was demonstrated by Shuji Nakamura).
Why are you posting here? Why bother?
Do yourself and everyone else a favor. Go away and leave the rest of us alone. We're better off without you, The only person who enjoys your whining is you. Stop it now.
Why is Snark Required?
How much energy it takes to switch 0/1 states? What voltage? As I am not in the field, it would take me too much time to extract this information from the article (what is "trimeron annihilation" and how/does it relate the classical hole-electron recombination?).
I assume that it is possible to be 1000 faster only if it takes considerably less energy to switch states. It means that even if the latency constrains the speed, it would still produce less heat and will allow simpler clock/power lines.
As I understand it, one of the major factors that slow the speed of today's electronics is power. Be it in the form of routing constraints (possibly wider metal lines and possibly wider minimum distance between them), power dissipation, battery capacity in mobile devices, or cooling in servers, all are constrained by power. If this technology can lower power requirements then there will be a significant speed-up either in the form of more cores on a chip, or newer computation models that work better with deeper pipelining or with wider SIMD operations.
Another potential advantage of the fast switching is that it enables or enhances other computing models. Maybe we will move farther away from a pure CPU programming model to an FPGA/CPU hybrid programming. It's time to brush up your VHDL/Verilog capabilities, or to teach your pet language (compiler/interpreter/JIT) how to emit an efficient HDL. The advantage of FPGA programming is that you can define your own pipelines according to the computing task at hand. Another thing to consider is that with these switching-speeds it could be profitable to time-share an FPGA. Finally, it may be possible to reprogram an FPGA in less than a second.
Electric cars were already off the shelf products in the 90's. The 1890's... That was before oil became really cheap.
The 30 year rule is a nice rule of thumb, but it's only a rule of thumb and it is subject to competition by other technologies.
IIRC, making P-type material was easy doping with boron, and someone had finally come up with a way to make n-type material.
In addition, around that time there were two or three startups looking to manufacture diamonds using various -cheaper- processes. The combination of these things was supposes to give is diamond based chips that, due to the incredible heat resistance of diamond, could tolerate much more heat and hence higher clock cycles.
Does anyone know where this went?
Silence is a state of mime.
Does this mean I should stop having my dwarves smelt it into iron bars?
--- Math illiteracy affects 8 out of every 5 people.
BiCMOS is alive and well, thank you very much. It's just silly to use it for CPUs. Was it even used for any Intel chips at all? What for? It's pretty pointless unless you need bipolar-specific analog stuff on the same die.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
Also, whatever needs cryogenics simply won't end up in your desktop or cell phone.
Sure, but if it is a thousand times faster, it may very well go into servers! It'll be mainframe and terminals all over again - using this tech in servers that are big enough that the cryo cost is negligible.
Even if my computer is 1000 times faster, I'm still going to want a beowulf cluster of them...
The thing that immediately occurs to me is that this won't replace silicon. Silicon is massively available, it works, is well used and understood. Vanadium, in comparison is not. Plus, isn't it toxic? I know the semiconductor industry isn't what you would call green, but introducing an even more toxic element into the mix might not go down too well. I suspect this might, at the very best, have limited use in specialist applications. Making your computer thousands of times faster simply isn't going to happen.
Ultra-fast circuits at very low temperatures are a very old thing: Josephson-circuits do it. That technology did not deliver, just as this one will not. Why the stupid headline?
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Moore's law during 20-30 years doubling every 18 months makes a multiplication by 10000-1000000. Seems to be in the right ball park, then.
At 3.5Ghz light travels 8.6cm per clock cycle. A thousand time performance improvement would mean ~86 micrometers. Ie roughly 400 transistor widths at current feature size. Since there are about a billion transistors in a chip assuming a square configuration you'd have ~31600 transistors on a side. Ie your 1000X chip would take ~75 cycles just to cross from one side of the CPU to the other. That is assuming speed of light which electrons definitely don't achieve. You still have to get electrons from RAM, disk drives, GPU etc. In short you'd need a massive pipeline to keep the CPU busy. The CPU might get 1000X faster but it will just be similar to (Amhdal's Law) parallelism given an infinite number of CPUs you are limited to the serial execution time, instead you are limited to the time needed to load and store back your program. Might get a 10X improvement with a 1000X faster CPU still nice but diminishing returns.
Abundance of Silicon: Earth's Crust/p.p.m.: 277100
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
There is a reason we use different materials for high end optical and electrical switches. In material science we unfortunately see this all the time, where an optics group measures some interaction in a highly controlled environment and then projects that result onto a very complex electrical circuit. Generally optics groups which get published in places like Nature don't consider that they're measuring properties that are not actually relevant to a practical electrical circuit and not the only properties which might influence something like switching speed.
We could now step off an a wonderful discussion of rewarding over-reach in science, how the peer-review system is broken and how the publications-as-achievement system has derailed meaningful scientific advancement...
I don't think the first PC's were produced in million-sized batches either. Lemme think a moment, and confer with my buddy, Google.
It is only AFTER some measure of success is established that lots of millions become routine.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80#History
French suggested that the company could sell 50,000 computers, but more skeptical executives disagreed and suggested 1,000 to 3,000 per year at the target $199 price. Roach persuaded Tandy to agree to build 3,500—the number of Radio Shack stores—so that each store could use a computer for inventory purposes if they did not sell.
Still forecasting 3,000 sales a year, the company sold over 10,000 TRS-80s Model Is in its first one and a half months of sales, and over 200,000 during the product's lifetime.[
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Of course, most of the delay that limits clock speeds now is in the interconnect and not the switching devices. We're already using copper conductors and low-K dielectrics, so the next step is going to have to be superconducting interconnects.
Until then, it's mostly a laboratory curiousity.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
I strongly suspect that people are already suffering from future shock but have not put a finger on what is going on. Technology is a huge cause of job and social displacement at this time. It is not just the economy that is causing such chaos but the fact that less people can do a lot more work due to technology. Very fast and very smart computers will accelerate this pending upheaval. I am all for it but we need to be paying attention and doing triage on the wounded and displaced and even learn to identify changes that we do not tend to see clearly. One example is the tendency of youth to take wild risks lately. It is as if their future is hopeless therefore they feel they might as well destroy themselves. Radical stunts on skateboards are an example. For teens to seriously damage themselves over and over again and think that it is funny when they really do permanent injury to themselves is shocking. It even extends to risky drug use and teen suicides as well. They can not sum it up but in essence feel that they are worthless as they see no reasonable place in society for them in the future due to technology-computers-robotics making human labor less and less important. This has gone so fat that even education is questionable as a negative expense in that usually more education will not be enough to change anything in the lives of teens or young adults. We absolutely must get social policy to advance as quickly as technology. We really are not very far from replacing humans for truck and service driving. There go millions of jobs. We also are on the edge of fast food joints that no longer need humans in the cooking areas.
Times have changed though, and you have to make a big case for smaller batch sizes. Otherwise, a lot of the chip producers already have worked out exactly how many they need to make in what amount of time to have a reasonable chance of making a profit. Some friends who left academia for chip producing companies have complained of how often the tech they worked on got dropped from designs, all because it slowed down the process too much. This isn't like a factor of ten issue, but because more like they were given 30 seconds per wafer for one stage, and the new tech took 40 seconds instead, so it gets dropped.
Isn't magnetite that natural iron form they make trinkets of to sell in Jamaican bazaars, typically in the form of animatable copluating humans, for placement as a dongle on mechanical security device unlocking portable storage ring?
Oh wait, that's its brother hematite.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
In 1901, the company produced 425 cars, making it the first high-volume gasoline-powered automobile manufacturer.
I would hardly call 425 vehicles produced, not sold, in a year off the shelf and even then gasoline vehicles weren't what people were buying who could afford a horseless carriage (very apt description of these early vehicles) as electrics and steam vehicles outsold gasoline ones. Other than for collector or historical value you wouldn't want one of those 1890s era vehicles regardless of the power source as a daily driver.
Time to offend someone
Silicon replaced GaAs in the 1970s even though it was slower, because it could manufactured smaller for a much lower cost.
...because "Vanadium Dioxide Valley" doesn't quite have that ring to it.
We can already make silicon faster than we do, electromigration is why we don't. Switching to a different wafer material doesn't change the fact that we still have to interconnect the transistors somehow.
The "1000 times faster than" current technology is blatantly false. They're claiming 1 ps. I couldn't find propagation delay data for the best current silicon processes, but 3 ps is a reasonable estimate, at room temperature.
They may have made a nice discovery, and it may be amenable to significant improvement, but so far they haven't demonstrated that they're going to replace silicon.
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If Magnetite is so much faster, have they considered using Magnemite? And wouldn't Magneton be even better?
Was it even used for any Intel chips at all?
Pentium and Pentium Pro. Dropped with the advent of Pentium II.
What for?
Execution units, I believe - but I'm not completely sure, I've read about that a long time ago.
Ezekiel 23:20
Another thing they did on internal combustion cars was to add the electric starter and electric lights. That removed the major advantage of going electric in the first place.
Yep, 20-30 years is a good estimate, especially since you also need to factor in the cost of the factory that will build something.
Regular silicon fabs using current feature sizes (and new toolsets) cost billions. Whereas older fabs with larger feature sizes (and older toolsets) that will still do the job for 90% of the applications needed can be picked up or built relatively cheaply in the hundreds of millions or even tens of millions.
Just because it can be done doesn't mean it will be done.
Just because it can be done doesn't mean it will be done.
Totally offtopic, but this immediately inspired the contrapositive: :D Politics comes to mind... :P
"Just because it can't be done doesn't mean that it won't be done."
I'm sure this applies to something, somewhere!
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/