How Vacuum Tubes, New Technology Might Save Moore's Law

MojoKid (1002251) writes The transistor is one of the most profound innovations in all of human existence. First discovered in 1947, it has scaled like no advance in human history; we can pack billions of transistors into complicated processors smaller than your thumbnail. After decades of innovation, however, the transistor has faltered. Clock speeds stalled in 2005 and the 20nm process node is set to be more expensive than the 28nm node was for the first time ever. Now, researchers at NASA believe they may have discovered a way to kickstart transistors again — by using technology from the earliest days of computing: The vacuum tube. It turns out that when you shrink a Vacuum transistor to absolutely tiny dimensions, you can recover some of the benefits of a vacuum tube and dodge the negatives that characterized their usage. According to a report, vacuum transistors can draw electrons across the gate without needing a physical connection between them. Make the vacuum area small enough, and reduce the voltage sufficiently, and the field emission effect allows the transistor to fire electrons across the gap without containing enough energy to energize the helium inside the nominal "vacuum" transistor. According to researchers, they've managed to build a successful transistor operating at 460GHz — well into the so-called Terahertz Gap, which sits between microwaves and infrared energy.

Comments

Not a computing element

[Animats]

As a 450GHz computing element, this is a long way off. But it might lead to better terahertz radar. Right now, operating in the terahertz range is painfully difficult. It's a strange region where both electronics and optics work, but not easily. This may be a more effective way to work in that range.

Re:Not a computing element

[wanax]

That's mentioned in the IEEE Spectrum article (which by the way is about the most clearly written article on an early prototype technology that I've ever read).
The problems are:
-Too high voltage; can be mitigated by better geometry (probably).
-Insufficient simulations at present for improving the geometry, with the caveat that getting better performance (voltage-wise) might compromise durability.
-Because of the above, they don't have a good set of design rules to produce an integrated circuit. They're hopeful about this step, since the technique uses well established CMOS technology and there are many tools available.

Their next targets are things like gyroscopes and accelerometers. I'd say on the whole this strikes me as realistic and non-sensational. But if anybody knows better, I'd like to hear why.

The problem is not switch speed

[YoungManKlaus]

but that with increasing clock speed the size of your chip is limited (as electricity can only travel that far in a given amount of time) -> can't keep your chip synchronized -> need to think of new ways how to sync everything / if there are alternatives.

Re:The problem is not switch speed

[Chatterton]

Asynchronous designs are faster (~3x) and consume less energy (~2x) but need an overhaul of the production process who is deemed too costly. Perhaps this technology could make it interesting again. (Source)

Re:The problem is not switch speed

[SuricouRaven]

Not the production process so much as the design process. It'd mean starting over from scratch with a whole new architecture, redoing decades of work in hardware and software.

Re:The problem is not switch speed

[lowen]

One of the problems with increasing clock speed is gate capacitance and the RC time constant charging curve causing the switching FETs to operate in the linear region, causing power dissipation to go up with clock speed. This is why a decrease in process size has typically yielded a corresponding decrease in power dissipation at a given clock speed.

If you make the capacitance smaller, you can increase the switching speed (capacitance would decrease with the square of the feature size (gate capacitance is dependent upon gate area), wheras resistance would increase linearly, inversely proportional to feature width, assuming the feature depth doesn't change (resistance dependent upon cross-sectional area)).

Another poster has already mentioned asynchronous designs, so I'll pass on that particular nuance.

But clock propagation is a serious issue, and I can see a vacuum transistor improving this considerably.

Now, figuring out how far a wavefront will propagate in some period of time isn't too hard.

Undoped silicon has a relative permittivity of 11.68; the reciprocal of the square root of the relative permittivity is the velocity factor of a particular dielectric; for undoped silicon that's about 30% of c. Silicon dioxide, as used for most of the insulation on the typical MOSFET design, has a relative permittivity of 3.9 and thus a VF of about 51%. On a stripline laid on silicon dioxide (silica glass) the velocity of propagation is about 153 million meters per second, or 153 meters per microsecond or 153 millimeters per nanosecond or 153 microns per picosecond. 153 microns is a bit larger than the cladding on a typical fiber optic strand (most have a cladding diameter of 125 microns; OM1 multimode is 62.5 micron core/125 micron cladding, OM4 is 50 micron core/125 micron cladding, and single-mode is 8 micron core/125 micron cladding, for comparison). That's best case propagation time.

Now, to see how this translates to something of today, at least one of the models of the latest Haswell-DT Core i7 chips has a die size of 177 square millimeters. The chip is not square, and seems to be about a 4:1 rectangle in photos, which would yield about a 6.5 mm by 27.25mm die (yes, I know that gives 177.125 square millimeters; close enough).

Now, if a clock signal needs to go straight across the narrow portion, it will take about 42.5 picoseconds to do so, assuming transmission across silion dioxide alone. Propagation in the long direction would take about 178 picoseconds to do so, with the same assumption. The published top speed of this processor is at the time of this writing about 4.5GHz (I know it's a bit higher, but that's a moving target). This is a 222 picosecond clock period; easily doable in the short dimension, a bit more difficult in the long dimension, and probably already requiring some asynchronous elements and delay compensation. If you limit solely on clock propagation time, and are able to work in a slip of a full clock cycle, the long dimension will give you a limit of a bit over 5.5GHz; the short dimension will similarly give you a limit of 23.5GHz.

That's drastically oversimplified; each gate has it's own propagation delay that must be figured, and there are four cores (which makes it pretty understandable why the chip would have a 4:1 die dimension ratio, no?). A 20% clock delay factor will allow, with care, a good chance for synchronous operation (42.5 is pretty close to 20% of 222), but that's assuming straight clock traces (and they are not just straight across the chip).

Food for thought.

That would be handy for radio astronomy too

[NixieBunny]

I work in a lab where we make radio receivers that work at frequencies around 460 GHz. As it is, we have to use a mixer diode to convert to a lower frequency (10 GHz) before amplifying the signal. This technology would be well suited to this application, provided that the noise is low enough. We already cool the mixer to 4K in a vacuum chamber.

Re:That would be handy for radio astronomy too

[MattskEE]

I just noticed another disingenuous aspect to their claim - they say that because this operates at "atmospheric" pressure it will be more reliable than vacuum tubes of yore.

But these vacuum FETs are filled with 1 atmosphere of helium, so the partial pressure difference with the outside world for all other gases will still be the same as though it was operating with a full vacuum, and this device would require the same long-term hermetic packaging as a vacuum tube. It relies on helium to extend the mean free path of the electrons, though to be fair as dimensions are scaled down further from the current 100nm to say 20nm perhaps neither helium nor vacuum would be required. Still it seems to be a very misleading claim.

Magic Smoke

[niftydude]

So in the future, you'll know your electronics are broken when magic smoke is sucked into the chip?

Re:Magic Smoke

[Meneth]

TFA says these transistors would be filled with helium gas, and if it gets replaced with other gases, the thing would quickly stop working due to ionization.

So I guess there'd be magic smoke going both in and out of the chip.

Pity Whitney Houston isn't still around

[Viol8]

Stick her in front of a mike then tell her no more drugs and press record. That would have got you pretty close to that frequency range.

Valvistor?

[tuoppi]

Should this type of component be known as an "valvistor"?

Re:Why is helium the new answer?

[SuricouRaven]

They really are. The US government has been selling off reserves for below-production-cost for some time, causing prices to be artificially low.

Ahead of schedule.

[SuricouRaven]

"It was a nice feeling to have a Microvac of your own and Jerrodd was glad he was part of his generation and no other. In his father's youth, the only computers had been tremendous machines taking up a hundred square miles of land. There was only one to a planet. Planetary ACs they were called. They had been growing in size steadily for a thousand years and then, all at once, came refinement. In place of transistors had come molecular valves so that even the largest Planetary AC could be put into a space only half the volume of a spaceship."

- Issac Asimov, The Last Question, 1956.

Ideal technology for high radiation/space

[earthforce_1]

This looks like the ideal technology for electronics that have to work in extremes of temperatures or high radiation environments. I'm surprised the military and aerospace industries aren't jumping all over this.

Re:Planck trumps Moore

[CeasedCaring]

Maybe he does, maybe he doesn't. I'm uncertain...

Re:More expensive for whom?

[thue]

Intel has an insanely high Gross Profit Margin of 75%. That is the opposite of selling at a loss.

http://www.thestreet.com/story...

Discovered?

[mark_reh]

Natural things and phenomena are "discovered". Transistors were invented after a lot of hard work. By engineers.

Re:Discovered?

[tgeek]

Yep! Leave it to our government to totally bypass the faster-than-light propulsions systems, advanced life support and other amazing alien technology and go straight for the techs to make cheap, pocket-sized AM radios! (probably subbed the research out to GE)

Re:Planck trumps Moore

[Anonymous Coward]

Gus Fring trumps Heisenberg.

Re:Why is helium the new answer?

[Opportunist]

Astrophysicists say no.

Why are we saving a law?

[Murdoch5]

A law needs to stand on it's own with out the need for external help, if Moores law break then it's not a law.

Re:Why are we saving a law?

[bondsbw]

Does that mean Obamacare isn't a law?

Re:More expensive for whom?

[K. S. Kyosuke]

I'm not an economist, but there seems to be an easy explanation for that: If the CPU cost is only a fraction of the total system cost, not even progressive pricing of the CPUs decreases the complete system's price/performance ratio to an appreciable extent. That would mean that Intel can manufacture CPUs that are somewhat (though not vastly) faster than AMD CPUs at a considerably higher price and with large profit margins while still outselling AMD even in areas where AMD has better prices for individual components.

Re:More expensive for whom?

[jbmartin6]

Gross profit is not the same as net profit, and has little relation to selling at a loss. From the same article:

the net profit margin of 15.12% trails the industry average.

Re:Planck trumps Moore

[ArcadeMan]

Just ask Madoka.

Re:Whitney Houston's crack

[omnichad]

Yep - Mariah Carey hits the highest notes:
http://www.concerthotels.com/w...

Whitney Houston is WAY down the list at #23, below even Elton John and Miley Cyrus.

Re:Why is helium the new answer?

[Immerman]

All we need to do is figure out how to mine the Sun and we'll have all the helium we could ever want.

2000 called and wanted its P4 back

[tepples]

You sound like an Intel engineer back when the Pentium 4 CPU's NetBurst architecture was the next big thing. Yes, pipelining exists. Yes, branches stall it. Yes, the processor ends up forfeiting a lot of work (and a lot of power and heat) when it mispredicts a branch. There's a reason Intel decided to base the Core architecture on P6 (Pentium II/III family) rather than NetBurst.

Re:More expensive for whom?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually making the chips is wildly cheap (always has been). They make a few thousand at a crack. It is all the other goop that goes along with chips that makes them expensive. If you read the original paper you will see Moore spends a good amount of time talking about packaging.

Testin, the package, pins, interconnects to the pins, wires to connect to other chips, the connectors, someone to glue it all together, etc...

The less chips you use the cheaper it is to make something. That is why moores law works. As instead of working with 50 chips you are working with 5 a 10x reduction in cost.

It works all the way up until you have SoC. At that point it becomes about your cost to make the single chip. Which includes more significantly the process to make the chip. As all the interconnects are gone, the other chips are gone, pins are gone, etc...

So at some point you would see inversions. Where it costs to make one chip more than the previous generation. Yet it is still cheaper because there are less things to put on the motherboard.

This is part of the reason ARM chips dominate currently. They spent 25 years getting into cell phones. Where size matters. SoC is king. Intel will have to get bellow the cost of ARM SoC to remain competitive in that area.

# of chips is what moores law is about. Size is the key to get you less chips and less crap outside of the chip to put together. Speed just came along for the ride.