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Intel Moving Forward With 10nm, Will Switch Away From Silicon For 7nm
An anonymous reader writes: Intel has begun talking about its plans for future CPU architectures. The company is already working on a 10nm manufacturing process, and expects the first such chips to be ready by early 2017. Beyond that, things are getting difficult. Intel says it will need to move away from silicon when it develops a 7nm process. "The most likely replacement for silicon is a III-V semiconductor such as indium gallium arsenide (InGaAs), though Intel hasn't provided any specific details yet." Even the current 14nm chips they're making ran into unexpected difficulties. "While Intel didn't provide any specifics, we strongly suspect that we're looking at the arrival of transistors based on III-V semiconductors. III-V semiconductors have higher electron mobility than silicon, which means that they can be fashioned into smaller and faster (as in higher switching speed) transistors."
Amazing that we're getting to 7nm, and rather than saying we can't do it, there's just casual talk about how they will have to switch away from silicone. Really incredible. Will they just keep marching forward to less than 7nm and into other exotic configs?
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
Nope. They've decided to hit 7nm and then call it a day.
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GaAs was the future of super-fast transistors. The Cray 3 was made from GaAs.
GaAs has a much higher electron mobility than silicon, 8,5000 versus about 1,500 for silicon. This allows for much faster switching. InGaAs has an electron mobility of 10,000 allowing even faster switching.
But that's just electrons which are used in P channel MOSFETs. For CMOS, you also need N channel MOSFETS. The kicker is that GaAs and InGaAs have respectively lower and much lower hole mobility so the N channel FETs switch rather slower than silicon.
CMOS is by far the only architecture. Historically it is the most power efficient since it only spends energy switching. On high speed, small scale CMOS, however, lots of power goes into the switching itself, the switching is fast enough that the devices don't really act very ideally and there's a lot of leakage.
Perhaps at very extreme ends, other architectures can compete, power wise.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Moore's Law had a good run, but she's dead Jim.
It doesn't look that dead just yet. While that graph shows a straight diagonal line of transistor count over time, there should also be a flat line alongside showing the number of people who predict that Moore's Law is dead.
Maybe they can partner with Apple and make a really skinny macbook.
Why would they need to partner with Apple when they can just shrink their own competing Ultrabook spec? They own the trademark to it after all.
Welcome InGaAs Valley
I'm surprised Moore's Law lasted this long. Other bottlenecks seem to be more of a factor of late such that I thought CPU's would take a bit of a rest due to diminishing practical returns, analogous to a Ferrari stuck in traffic.
Table-ized A.I.
will involve making chips taller, ie various forms of 3D ICs. That would mean that we could continue to get the apparent effects of higher densities at least for a while, though we'd really just be making taller or chips or better interconnected layers, but it would also mean that the cost of transistors wouldn't go down, it would probably go up.
> III-V semiconductor such as indium gallium arsenide (InGaAs
I think the french will like it and possibly the swedes. They use Gallium and Indium based semiconductors in airborne electronic warfare systems, which allows for very high RF energy output in physically very small and high temperature tolerant packages. (For example used in the Dassault Rafale and SAAB Gripen fighter jets). The french SPECTRE jamming suite is especially famous: the Rafale plane is not stealthy, only has reduced radar reflection, but the french trusted their system enough so their pilots were already flying deep in lybian airspace by the time the US Navy started to launch Tomahawk cruise missiles at Gaddhafi. Supposedly there is something equal or better in the american F-35 JSF, but that airframe is so buggy one must wonder if it will ever enter service?
On the other hand non-silicon semiconductors, like Ga and IN tend to cost twice the price of pure gold per weight or more. At the most extreme end, the soviet-russians even created diamond-based semiconductors, for use in space weapons and a planned Venus robotic rover. They invented a diamond crystal growing machine for the purpose, which after the Cold War was sold to a US company, which nowadays grows and sells multiple carat "cultured" yellow diamonds for ladyfolk decoration purposes. Beware, that femme fatale may wear a supercomputer on her finger! Now you know why multiple-finger gesture support was developed by Synaptics...
That is actually not correct. ... many of them are actually absolutely not rare.
The comes from the fact that they where considered rare when they where discovered, the whole third group and the Lanthanoids are considered 'rare earth metals'
Their oxydes are rare ores, perhaps you meant that. On the other hand 'deposites' of thise minerals are rare, too. But they are usually mined in quantities together with other ores, the primary ore of the deposite in question.
See e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L....
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Despite their name, rare earth elements (with the exception of the radioactive promethium) are relatively plentiful in Earth's crust, with cerium being the 25th most abundant element at 68 parts per million (similar to copper). However, because of their geochemical properties, rare earth elements are typically dispersed and not often found concentrated as rare earth minerals in economically exploitable ore deposits.[3] It was the very scarcity of these minerals (previously called "earths") that led to the term "rare earth".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...
it's in my head
The ingredients are definitely nasty, so there's concern for industrial waste and exposure. However, the finished material has proven to be relatively harmless in animal studies. I was surprised to learn this, but that seems to be the conclusion, so there should be no immediate risk for using the end products.
I'm not sure about the stability of the compounds or how they degrade over time.
Chips that run hotter also have more thermal gradient, which can put mechanical stress on the various delicate layers of the chip. Being able to run hotter means you can support more of a thermal gradient to ambient, and thus support more heat flow and thus more computations/sec. However, at some point you're going to cause mechanical failure of the chip, especially if the stresses cycle.
So not only termperature tolerance, but also coefficient of thermal expansion and strength of all the various materials is going to count when it comes to longevity.
--PM
The cost of the raw materials is completely dwarfed by the cost of processing. Even a very large chip (2 cm x 2cm by .5mm thick) masses less than a gram. It's also likely that these high-performance III-V chips will be built on a cheaper substrate, meaning the thickness of the expensive stuff will be much, much smaller.
It's a bit more complicated that that. Even if an element is somewhat abundant but evenly distributed in the earth's crust, then it's difficult to mine. It's only practical to mine something if it's concentrated in some areas. E.g. gold is rare but you can find it in macroscopic flecks or clumps that are concentrated in certain areas. If gold were not concentrated like that but was instead uniformly distributed in the crust, there'd be no economical way to mine it.
That said, it looks like indium is concentrated somewhere: in zinc ores. So large scale production may be possible.