Well Moore's law is almost petering out again. Some serious difficulties appear to be cropping their heads once you go below about 30nm, not that there aren't substantial difficulties already.
Interconnect capacitance is starting to be a real killer. As transistor sizes
shrink, their capacity to source & sink current drops a bit. Even with using copper for the interconnect layers, because the cross section of these wires is so small the resistance is non negligible. What this all means is that the
time required for the signal to travel over the wires that interconnect the transistors is on the average increasing even as feature size decreases. With gigahertz clock speeds, it
already takes several clock cycles for a signal to travel from one side of a large chip to the other. Buffers have to be inserted along wires every several micrometers to keep signal delays from increasing quadratically with length.
The material that is used for gate dielectrics, currently silicon dioxide, will likely have to be different. Something with a higher dielectric is needed. Problems are starting to occur because this oxide layer is getting
so thin.
Quick answer: Once the size of a chip gets to a particular size, it's more economical to split the functionality among several chips. This is because
defects exist in the silicon crystals of the semiconductor wafer. As the size of a chip increases, there is an expodentially increasing chance that the chip will have one of these defects in it, ruining the chip. With Small chip sizes, most of chips on a wafer are good. With large chip sizes most of the chips on a wafer ar bad. About 1cm^2 seems to be the practical upper limit on chip sizes these days.
You're not familiar with how they make CMOS semiconductors then. The
gate dielectric is almost always silcon dioxide. So consider a layer of
silicon dioxide crystal 11 molecular layers thick. That means if you make
a processing mistake and your layer is 12 molecular layers thick, you're going to notice it in terms of circuit performance.
Electrons may not be jumping wires, but they're already starting to jump across the gate dielectric. This is only a few (dozen or two) atomic layers in thickness already.
Lithography is not the only problem that must be solved in order to improve the density of the chips. There are problems involving the gate oxide, the dielectric of the insulator, routing, leakage currents, and interconnect capacitance issues.
The chips may get more dense, but the individual gates may no longer be getting faster. Getting faster chips will increasingly be dependant on implementing parallelism or pipelining at higher levels. Chip design will move away from 'Von Neuman' (or derivitive) type processor architectures.
Living in a good spaceship should be similar to living on a submarine. Think about it.
Today's nuclear subs go for three months at a time without surfacing.
Cypress has some chips containing analog circuitry on them that are
customizable. They include a processor as well. They go unter the name
PSoC. You can build filters, amps, and other neet stuff with them.
Search Circuit Cellar back issues for projects.
I believe studies have been done on the percentage of people believing in evolution or creation versus education level. The higher the level of education, the higher the percentage of people believing in evolution. This would lead me to believe that evolutionists have on average a higher IQ than creationists.
Abstrating evolution to a mathematical level, the theory is very elegant and has a mathematical beauty about it. Given a phisical means or a system that follows certain basic mathematical rules, evolution happens. You end up with 'species' and some of those species are 'smarter' than others. The small, simple ones don't necessarily die away completely, just like what we see in nature. Creationism is by comparison, does not have any mathematical model and is of no interest or value.
I guess, I just can't see the point in believing in creationism. You can't predict anything from it. You can't use it as a basis for experiments. It doesn't really explain current observations very well. It has no value.
The evidence is irrefutable. It is my position that natural selection is not up to the task of explaining how it occurs.
Natural selection may not completely explain evolution, but it certainly is a basis for evolutionary theory. It explains the part of the process that guides the direction of the evolutionary process. To explain where the variation in a population comes from requires knowing genetics and statistics as well.
I remember back when cameras didn't have built-in flash. Cameras for the masses used flash cubes or flash strips. The flash units for SLRs were separate items that attached to the hot shoe.
I think that one of the results of the experiment was that no matter how much a bad song is artificically promoted, it still won't achieve the success of a good song.
No, the article was not very clear on this. In fact I doubt if the article's author had a grasp of what was going on. The control group was the first group. The second group was divided into multiple sub groups. In addition to artist name and song title, they also got to see something called 'number of times downloaded'. This number was manipulated by the experimenters and differed between the subgroups of the second group. What they found was that by manipulating this 'number of times downloaded' number, they could affect the actual download frequency of the songs.
A control group was used to determine the true quality of a song. This was done by
having members of the control group choose songs soley by artist name and song title. They then rated the songs they listened to.
For the other group, in addition to the Artist name and song title, they also got to see something called 'number of times downloaded'. The researchers would manipulate this number (i.e. the number of downloads was not actually what was indicated.) and they found
that by manipulating these numbers, they could control which songs got downloded more.
If they said a song was downloaded more often, then it tended to get downloaded more often. If they said a song was downloaded few times, then few people downloaded the song.
This really isn't news. Fifty years ago, if a record company wanted a record to sell well, all it had to do was to get the song played a lot on the radio. (By various means, legal or illegal). Popularity breeds popularity. Why would things be any
different these days?
As they evolved, mammals, reptiles, birds and most fish lost the ability. Today, only sharks and a few other marine species, such as sturgeons and lampreys, can sense electricity.
I beg to differ, as evidenced by the effectiveness of an electrified fence.
It may not be 'fact', but the evidence supporting this theory is much greater and more solid than the evidence supporting the theory that you got out of bed this morning.
The technology they're touting is called Strained Silicon (Not SOI). It changes the energy levels in the silicon crystal to get better properties, better conductance. It's not a totally new technology either (Blue LEDs anyone?), but maybe IBM has done something a bit different than others in their process.
Slashdot Mirror
Interconnect capacitance is starting to be a real killer. As transistor sizes shrink, their capacity to source & sink current drops a bit. Even with using copper for the interconnect layers, because the cross section of these wires is so small the resistance is non negligible. What this all means is that the time required for the signal to travel over the wires that interconnect the transistors is on the average increasing even as feature size decreases. With gigahertz clock speeds, it already takes several clock cycles for a signal to travel from one side of a large chip to the other. Buffers have to be inserted along wires every several micrometers to keep signal delays from increasing quadratically with length.
The material that is used for gate dielectrics, currently silicon dioxide, will likely have to be different. Something with a higher dielectric is needed. Problems are starting to occur because this oxide layer is getting so thin.
I thought that All the shuttles were already retired. I haven't heard of any planned launches lately.
Quick answer: Once the size of a chip gets to a particular size, it's more economical to split the functionality among several chips. This is because defects exist in the silicon crystals of the semiconductor wafer. As the size of a chip increases, there is an expodentially increasing chance that the chip will have one of these defects in it, ruining the chip. With Small chip sizes, most of chips on a wafer are good. With large chip sizes most of the chips on a wafer ar bad. About 1cm^2 seems to be the practical upper limit on chip sizes these days.
You're not familiar with how they make CMOS semiconductors then. The gate dielectric is almost always silcon dioxide. So consider a layer of silicon dioxide crystal 11 molecular layers thick. That means if you make a processing mistake and your layer is 12 molecular layers thick, you're going to notice it in terms of circuit performance.
the gate dielectric. This is only a few (dozen or two) atomic layers in thickness already.
Lithography is not the only problem that must be solved in order to improve
the density of the chips. There are problems involving the gate oxide, the
dielectric of the insulator, routing, leakage currents, and interconnect
capacitance issues.
The chips may get more dense, but the individual gates may no longer be getting
faster. Getting faster chips will increasingly be dependant on implementing parallelism or pipelining at higher levels. Chip design will move away from
'Von Neuman' (or derivitive) type processor architectures.
Well the parent did mention North Korea. That would be a communist country. Sounds pretty 'rouge' (red) to me.
Living in a good spaceship should be similar to living on a submarine. Think about it. Today's nuclear subs go for three months at a time without surfacing.
Oh yeah, I'm sure it will - for the first 5 days or so, until the first remote root is found in the default setup.
They said new level, they didn't say higher level.
Cypress has some chips containing analog circuitry on them that are customizable. They include a processor as well. They go unter the name PSoC. You can build filters, amps, and other neet stuff with them. Search Circuit Cellar back issues for projects.
My cow does.
Abstrating evolution to a mathematical level, the theory is very elegant and has a mathematical beauty about it. Given a phisical means or a system that follows certain basic mathematical rules, evolution happens. You end up with 'species' and some of those species are 'smarter' than others. The small, simple ones don't necessarily die away completely, just like what we see in nature. Creationism is by comparison, does not have any mathematical model and is of no interest or value.
I guess, I just can't see the point in believing in creationism. You can't predict anything from it. You can't use it as a basis for experiments. It doesn't really explain current observations very well. It has no value.
Doh! 6 days, the seventh he rested.
Natural selection may not completely explain evolution, but it certainly is a basis for evolutionary theory. It explains the part of the process that guides the direction of the evolutionary process. To explain where the variation in a population comes from requires knowing genetics and statistics as well.
I remember back when cameras didn't have built-in flash. Cameras for the masses used flash cubes or flash strips. The flash units for SLRs were separate items that attached to the hot shoe.
And a grey beard at that.
I think that one of the results of the experiment was that no matter how much a bad song is artificically promoted, it still won't achieve the success of a good song.
No, the article was not very clear on this. In fact I doubt if the article's author had a grasp of what was going on. The control group was the first group. The second group was divided into multiple sub groups. In addition to artist name and song title, they also got to see something called 'number of times downloaded'. This number was manipulated by the experimenters and differed between the subgroups of the second group. What they found was that by manipulating this 'number of times downloaded' number, they could affect the actual download frequency of the songs.
A control group was used to determine the true quality of a song. This was done by having members of the control group choose songs soley by artist name and song title. They then rated the songs they listened to.
For the other group, in addition to the Artist name and song title, they also got to see something called 'number of times downloaded'. The researchers would manipulate this number (i.e. the number of downloads was not actually what was indicated.) and they found that by manipulating these numbers, they could control which songs got downloded more. If they said a song was downloaded more often, then it tended to get downloaded more often. If they said a song was downloaded few times, then few people downloaded the song.
This really isn't news. Fifty years ago, if a record company wanted a record to sell well, all it had to do was to get the song played a lot on the radio. (By various means, legal or illegal). Popularity breeds popularity. Why would things be any different these days?
I beg to differ, as evidenced by the effectiveness of an electrified fence.
It may not be 'fact', but the evidence supporting this theory is much greater and more solid than the evidence supporting the theory that you got out of bed this morning.
The technology they're touting is called Strained Silicon (Not SOI). It changes the energy levels in the silicon crystal to get better properties, better conductance. It's not a totally new technology either (Blue LEDs anyone?), but maybe IBM has done something a bit different than others in their process.
50 % growth by 2020. That means they expect to build 3 reactors instead of the two they did last year.
I'm wondering how many more 'hands' my next watch will have. It took two hands when time was in just one dimension.
So what you're saying is these things can hold an erection for long periods of time.
Someone didn't RTFA.