In reality, there are already plenty of third-party fabs out there. For instance, TSMC. And they have a 65nm process and that's what ATI's new 2000 HD series is manufactured on. So AMD (which includes ATI) is already manufacturing a lot of chips through a third-party. Even more than that, the current lowest end AMD processors, the Geode family, which is being used for the OLPC is also already manufactured by a third-party.
The only contention in this story is that AMD will be moving more low-end manufacturing to third-parties. The highest-end CPU's really have to be manufactured by the company itself. Not only does AMD have to stay as close to the bleeding edge as possible but they also have to have control enough to add certain devices or change certain design constraints. The change in volume to a TSMC or other third-party manufacturer from moving over some of AMD's manufacuting would not affect their bottom line or cost very much at all.
In addition, there are plenty of companies making various chips for all kinds of purposes. The limiting factor for new entries into the general purpose processor business is not the fab technology . A company can find the few million to make the masks and start making runs but the number of engineers they would need to compete with a design from Intel or AMD is enormous and would take years. In addition, Via could make a chip at 65nm right now if they wanted to but they don't have the partners or the platforms or market for those chips so they're not going to do it.
So while I'm looking forward to the day when there can be lots of players in the high-performance CPU business, the day is not here yet and this rumor, even if it were true, would do almost nothing to bring it closer.
It's pretty obvious that this "innovation" is just one of many projects trying to bridge the traditional computer screen with tangible objects. The post mentions one of the other public projects. I also remember seeing this exact sort of thing at the MIT Media Lab 5 years ago and apparently it's still being developed. The real test is how useful and flexible the interface can become. Just like with the motion sensing in the Wii controllers, you can develop stuff all you want but until you make it cool, easy to use, easy to program, and introduce it to a mass market, it's really just a novelty.
It seems like this ruling directly applies (against Microsoft's favor) in the case of Microsoft's innuendos of patent infringement by Linux. From Microsoft's arguments in the case, object code and source code cannot be patented because it is not on a physical machine that performs the patented operations nor can it be directly installed on such a machine without going through an intermediate step (linking) in the foreign country. Thus, any open source project that provides the object or source code over the Internet but not the binary installer is completely shielded from any patent infringement claims by Microsoft because they are distributing non-installable data that doesn't constitute a patentable invention. I can't wait for Groklaw et al. to jump all over this fumble by Microsoft (as some are already discussing http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=200704301 21005424/). Seriously, besides saving some pocket change, can anyone understand what Microsoft was thinking here?
There are actually cases when you want one cheap big transistor as opposed to a million tiny ones. For instance, if you have a display, also made of organics, with pixels around a millimeter then you can manufacture driving circuits on the same substrate even directly below the pixel. This keeps costs low and allows new flexible substrates to be used for mobile applications. Other applications from the article are biotech and military where the transistors would be used as part of real-time biological/chemical detectors which need relatively large areas to pick up enough of the substance to be detected.
The bottom line is that no one thinks these things are going to be doing heavy-duty logic. But they can certainly do easy logic cheaply and in novel applications.
Probably because he knows it's never going to happen and he might as well say it to cast the company in a better light after the recent Apple DRM troubles in Europe.
The actual achievement here is significantly different then the summary suggests. This paper published in Nature describes a way that single-crystal organic transistors were patterned with a "stamping" technique onto flexible substrates. It is all three things that make it notable (and worthy of being in Nature): single-crystal organic, stamping, flexible substrates. Single-crystal organics have significantly higher mobilities and thus faster switching speeds and less power. Single-crystal growth is difficult because it previously required hand-placing a crystal seed or selecting crystals that grew on the correct axis. Stamping is a technique that enables easy manufacture onto flexible substrates because typically the flexible substrates (plastics) can't take the heat used in generating the transistors. So the transistors are grown on another more durable substrate and then transfered onto the flexible substrate. They also showed that the single-crystal organics were flexible enough not to break under torsion. Typically, crystals are more brittle like crystaline silicon and that is why they're not suitable for use in the next generation of flexible screens that will enable vastly reduced footprint for high-res, full-color, luminescent displays that will allow much bigger, roll-away screens for mobile applications.
Slashdot Mirror
In reality, there are already plenty of third-party fabs out there. For instance, TSMC. And they have a 65nm process and that's what ATI's new 2000 HD series is manufactured on. So AMD (which includes ATI) is already manufacturing a lot of chips through a third-party. Even more than that, the current lowest end AMD processors, the Geode family, which is being used for the OLPC is also already manufactured by a third-party.
The only contention in this story is that AMD will be moving more low-end manufacturing to third-parties. The highest-end CPU's really have to be manufactured by the company itself. Not only does AMD have to stay as close to the bleeding edge as possible but they also have to have control enough to add certain devices or change certain design constraints. The change in volume to a TSMC or other third-party manufacturer from moving over some of AMD's manufacuting would not affect their bottom line or cost very much at all.
In addition, there are plenty of companies making various chips for all kinds of purposes. The limiting factor for new entries into the general purpose processor business is not the fab technology . A company can find the few million to make the masks and start making runs but the number of engineers they would need to compete with a design from Intel or AMD is enormous and would take years. In addition, Via could make a chip at 65nm right now if they wanted to but they don't have the partners or the platforms or market for those chips so they're not going to do it.
So while I'm looking forward to the day when there can be lots of players in the high-performance CPU business, the day is not here yet and this rumor, even if it were true, would do almost nothing to bring it closer.
It's pretty obvious that this "innovation" is just one of many projects trying to bridge the traditional computer screen with tangible objects. The post mentions one of the other public projects. I also remember seeing this exact sort of thing at the MIT Media Lab 5 years ago and apparently it's still being developed. The real test is how useful and flexible the interface can become. Just like with the motion sensing in the Wii controllers, you can develop stuff all you want but until you make it cool, easy to use, easy to program, and introduce it to a mass market, it's really just a novelty.
It seems like this ruling directly applies (against Microsoft's favor) in the case of Microsoft's innuendos of patent infringement by Linux. From Microsoft's arguments in the case, object code and source code cannot be patented because it is not on a physical machine that performs the patented operations nor can it be directly installed on such a machine without going through an intermediate step (linking) in the foreign country. Thus, any open source project that provides the object or source code over the Internet but not the binary installer is completely shielded from any patent infringement claims by Microsoft because they are distributing non-installable data that doesn't constitute a patentable invention. I can't wait for Groklaw et al. to jump all over this fumble by Microsoft (as some are already discussing http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=200704301 21005424/). Seriously, besides saving some pocket change, can anyone understand what Microsoft was thinking here?
There are actually cases when you want one cheap big transistor as opposed to a million tiny ones. For instance, if you have a display, also made of organics, with pixels around a millimeter then you can manufacture driving circuits on the same substrate even directly below the pixel. This keeps costs low and allows new flexible substrates to be used for mobile applications. Other applications from the article are biotech and military where the transistors would be used as part of real-time biological/chemical detectors which need relatively large areas to pick up enough of the substance to be detected.
The bottom line is that no one thinks these things are going to be doing heavy-duty logic. But they can certainly do easy logic cheaply and in novel applications.
Probably because he knows it's never going to happen and he might as well say it to cast the company in a better light after the recent Apple DRM troubles in Europe.
The actual achievement here is significantly different then the summary suggests. This paper published in Nature describes a way that single-crystal organic transistors were patterned with a "stamping" technique onto flexible substrates. It is all three things that make it notable (and worthy of being in Nature): single-crystal organic, stamping, flexible substrates. Single-crystal organics have significantly higher mobilities and thus faster switching speeds and less power. Single-crystal growth is difficult because it previously required hand-placing a crystal seed or selecting crystals that grew on the correct axis. Stamping is a technique that enables easy manufacture onto flexible substrates because typically the flexible substrates (plastics) can't take the heat used in generating the transistors. So the transistors are grown on another more durable substrate and then transfered onto the flexible substrate. They also showed that the single-crystal organics were flexible enough not to break under torsion. Typically, crystals are more brittle like crystaline silicon and that is why they're not suitable for use in the next generation of flexible screens that will enable vastly reduced footprint for high-res, full-color, luminescent displays that will allow much bigger, roll-away screens for mobile applications.