Graphene breakthrough threatens silicon's chip glory
109222
This time they mean it For years graphene has proved a cruel temptress for the semiconductor avant garde. The material - a layer of carbon atoms grouped in the ever popular honeycomb lattice - promised major performance gains over silicon. The problem with the stuff, however, has been arranging it in a large enough layer to replicate the 8- to 12-inch circular wafers favored by the major chip makers.â¦
273228
In anticipation of Moore&#39;s Law becoming irrelevant in the next 10 to 20 years, the National Science Foundation (NSF) wants funding for research that could lead to a replacement for current silicon technology.The NSF last week requested $20 million from the U.S. government for fiscal 2009 to start the &quot;Science and Engineering Beyond Moore&#39;s Law&quot; effort, which would fund academic research on technologies, including carbon nanotubes, quantum computing, and massively multicore computers, that could improve and replace current transistor technology.Moore&#39;s Law states that the number of transistors that can be placed on silicon, and its attendant computational capability, doubles every 18 months.Human and economic progress in the U.S. over the past 20 years has depended on an increasing ability to do information processing and computing, said Michael Foster, division director of computing and communication foundations at NSF. &quot;If the current technological basis of that ends, we&#39;ve got to find some way to replace it, or we&#39;re going to stop moving forward.&quot;The traditional way to improve transistor performance is to decrease the thickness of the gate oxide, or insulator that separates one part of the transistor from the other. The looming barrier is that transistors will be shrunk as small as possible for them to still work effectively, after which they may need to be replaced or somehow improved on, Foster said.&quot;In the kind-of near future -- in 8 to 10 years -- we will have reduced that gate oxide thickness to the point where it will no longer act as an effective insulator,&quot; Foster said. &quot;I don&#39;t know of any other proposals to increase the performance of... [current] transistors, which is why we have to look at really radically new structures like transistors based on nanostructures.&quot;Carbon nanotubes could provide a way to create smaller transistors, Foster said. Transistor performance is correlated to transistor size -- the smaller a transistor, the better it performs. &quot;Carbon nanotubes give us the possibility of much smaller transistors than we can make right now,&quot; Foster said.Carbon nanotubes could also be used as interconnect on circuits, Foster said. Nanotubes could be placed one after another on a circuit, though it would require fault-tolerant architectures. That would require new research and improvements on chip architecture as well, Foster said. &quot;We think architecture is going to become an important component of any beyond-Moore&#39;s-Law topic,&quot; Foster said.Looking far ahead, quantum computing could be the next answer to delivering massive computing power, Foster said. Quantum computing uses matter -- atoms and molecules -- to process massive amounts of tasks at supercomputing speeds because basic data units, called qubits, hold both the values 0 and 1 simultaneously and share those values among all qubits. It is based on the laws of quantum mechanics, which look at interaction and behavior of matter on atomic and subatomic -- proton, neutron, and electron -- levels.&quot;The implementations we have so far will, for example, trap single ions at very cold temperatures and use those as qubits. That takes a room full of equipment to make a very small register. We clearly need progress there, but it&#39;s promising,&quot; Foster said.The idea behind quantum computing is that it provides inherent parallelism, so its development requires improvements in parallel programming, in which several computers work on the same program together, Foster said. Parallel programming has been researched since the 1970s, but progress has been slow, Foster said.&quot;We could continue to expand our IT abilities without necessarily expanding the capabilities in any one computer. But we need software research to understand how to coordinate the efforts of not just one or two computers, but thousands or millions of computers,&quot; Foster said. That poses a research problem as scientists have been trying to understand parallel programming for decades and haven&#39;t succeeded yet, Foster said.NSF is already doing research in nanotechnology, software, and architectural ideas that will contribute to the effort to develop chips that will continually improve computing power beyond Moore&#39;s Law.Ultimately, current transistors may be hard to replace, Foster said, so researchers may look to develop better architectures and chip designs that use current transistor technology to maintain the computing capability growth rate.&quot;It&#39;s not out of the question to me that we could build very large chips with thousands of cores on them -- I hesitate to go too much higher than that just because it will sound crazy -- but if we did that... we [could] use those things to get done the computing and information technology that we need to have done,&quot; Foster said.The $20 million budget request is modest compared to research budgets of companies like Intel and IBM. &quot;The funding is intended to help laboratories assist, not compete, with research from the private sector,&quot; Foster said. NSF will seed academic laboratories and industry associations like Semiconductor Research to conduct research, which in turn may work with commercial organizations. The commercial organizations may further invest in the research to drive it into mass production, Foster said.Expectations from the project are modest, Foster said. &quot;It&#39;s very early-stage research. Any expectations we have will probably not be accurate.&quot; However, it could lead to better fault-tolerant techniques to design and operate systems with small components in them, Foster said.
706958
The chip unveiled at IDF works, but there are a lot of hurdles to overcome before an 80-core chip shows up in a living room.
101952
Research work could mean data gets in and out of computer chips at speed of light.
294687
Chips have become so tiny that atomic-level defects cause serious problems.
629159
Prototype 90-nanometer radio chip promises more power than current CMOS technology.
675636
Krishna Palem thinks introducing a little uncertainty into computer chips could extend battery life in mobile devices--and maybe the duration of Moore's Law, too.
764255
Researchers at IBM and AMD have improved a chip-making technology called strained silicon. Their announcement, of a new and unique strained silicon transistor technology, is aimed at improving processor performance and power efficiency.
534389
Chipmaker to focus on technology and features instead of megahertz.
194526
Nanotechnology could enable engineers to combine the functions of memory chips and disk drives on a device the size of a dime.
433138
Poorly-formed carbon nanotubes grown on carbon cloth make an efficient electron emitter, which promises cheaper displays, x-ray sources, and microwave power supplies.
245114
Researchers say they've created a nifty optics-on-a-chip device that overcomes a major obstacle in harnessing the full power and speed of light waves. By the Associated Press.
241346
Scientists have developed an alloy they say can be used to create memory chips more than 500 times as fast as todayÂs flash chips.
288583
Specialist in nanomaterial manufacturing will use its process to develop silicon cells.
556966
The chipmaker says its new method allows extraneous silicon to be utilized rather than discarded.
59331
Data speeds could get a boost from Intel breakthrough into processors that make and manipulate light.
408093
Intel develops a new chip that roughly doubles the number of transistors on a chip.