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."

Comments

Hummm...

[gagol]

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).

Re:Hummm...

[jwinterm]

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).

Another problem with GaAs and other III-V semiconductors is that they do not scale well, and so you can not pack as many transistors on a chip, and so they just can not compete with silicon in logic. They are quite useful for other applications, but not in your computer. Besides the low temperature hurdle, it's not clear if these new materials will face the same cost and scalability problems as III-Vs.

Re:should be on the market in five years or less

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

I thought latency was the main issue?

[Racemaniac]

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...

Re:I thought latency was the main issue?

[darkHanzz]

since having your signal only travel 0.1 mm per clock pulse makes it rather hard to get the data around...

There's still plenty of fixed-function hardware around (wlan chipsets, even though they're somewhat programmable) for which this might not be a major issue.

Re:I thought latency was the main issue?

[serviscope_minor]

Latency is a problem certainly, but there's still some headroom. With a pipelined processor the signal doesn't have to propagate further than the next stage (ok that simplifies it a bit). At the moment, a top end processor is of order 1cm across (and now that's mostly cache and graphics), and even quite substantial ARM cores are down into the fairly small number of mm.

I suspect that unlike in the good old days, much like increasing transistor count no longer increases performance linearly, the same will go with clock speed once the processor is around one wavelength across.

One hypothetical way would be to have lots of really tiny, simple processors which are 0.01mm across, and then juice them up to 3THz.

Re: Dr. Hermann Dürr

[Anonymous Coward]

Fucking slashdot, with its lack of support for basic unicode. What is this? 1996?

Re:Overclock

[cupantae]

With a normal operating temperature of -190C, you'd probably need an extra fan or something to overclock it.

Re:Too bad

[osu-neko]

Back in the days, when slashdot...

That's a bit of an obvious troll coming from someone with a seven digit UID... :p

Re:should be on the market in five years or less

[TheRaven64]

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.

Re:Why FTL?

[rufty_tufty]

No, the clock signal needs to time between two connecting flip flops nothing more. It's extremely common (i.e. it's about 5% of my job) to have to change the design in order to achieve this local clocking requirement.
That's without having multiple asynchronous clocks on a single chip.
Or asynchronous logic

Even when you need to do very long paths it's called a clock tree for a reason you can have a 1GHz clock that takes several ns to get from its source PLL to its destination flop because the delay through the tree to all the leaf nodes is matched. that is a 1ns period clock can take 4ns to get from the source to the destination, and that's all fine because as long as it's the same 4ns...
  Now things get harder when different bits of the chip have silicon that runs at different speeds so you can't balance the tree like you'd like to, but that's what makes this job interesting ;-)

Re:should be on the market in five years or less

[lxs]

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).

Will it pan out?

[wbr1]

I seem to remember about 10 or so years ago a bit of talk about diamond semiconductors.

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?

Re:Think of all the opportunities!

[tibit]

Well, let's see. The Solar System weighs on the order of 10^30 kg. That's 2^100 kg. There's 2^86 atoms in a kilogram of hydrogen. That's only 2^186 hydrogens in our solar system, if its whole mass was hydrogen. You seem to be right - iterating through 2^256 is quite unfeasible.

Assuming iteration speed of 2^32/second, given 2^24 seconds per year, and a billion PCs worldwide (2^30), we could "crunch" only a space of 2^86. Our current resources are about a factor of 2^170 too small :)