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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 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...
With a normal operating temperature of -190C, you'd probably need an extra fan or something to overclock it.
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Back in the days, when slashdot...
That's a bit of an obvious troll coming from someone with a seven digit UID... :p
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
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
"The weirdest thing about a mind, is that every answer that you find, is the basis of a brand new cliche" -
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.