3-D carbon nanotube chip fab
HollyMinkowski
Posts: 1,398
New techniques make carbon-based integrated circuits more practical
3-D chip fabrication is the future.... there is no way 2-D will allow advancement
for many more years. Moore's Law will break down unless we go 3-D
www.physorg.com/news179596676.html
article said...
three-dimensional circuits allow for packing of more units - in this case, transistors - into a confined area. On chips, the third dimension can also reduce the lengths of some interconnecting wires, reducing energy required for data transmission. While engineers have recently begun making progress in building three-dimensional circuits by stacking and connecting layers made with conventional materials, the Stanford work shows it can be done with nanotubes in a way that is integrated from the start as a 3-D design, yielding a higher density of connections among layers.
3-D chip fabrication is the future.... there is no way 2-D will allow advancement
for many more years. Moore's Law will break down unless we go 3-D
www.physorg.com/news179596676.html
Comments
I strongly suspect that Moore's law has already broken down because of heat buildup in dense 2-D chips.
I suspect that going to 3-D would actually make the heat buildup worse due to more transistors will less overall surface area.
At 3.3volts, we reduce the amount of heat compared to 5volts, but it is next to impossible to go lower with diodes in logic circuits. And the faster we clock, the hotter the chips run.
If anything is really going to help, it will be some sort of 'nano-cooling device'.
Furthermore, if one isn't running complex video in real time, 32bit processors seem quite fast enough. My biggest bottleneck is my ADSL link to the world outside Taiwan, not my computer.
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Aren't the more advanced chips running at 1.6V now?
(I believe that the Prop II is being designed as dual 1.6/3.3V, with 1.6Vinterally, and 3.3V on IO-pins)
Getting a more compact design will also allow for other design savings.
Would you believe that the internal clock circuitry on a DIGITAL Alpha CPU takes up 20% of the die?
(High speed and long lines internally forced them to make it that big.)
Shorter lines as this 3D technique seemsto promise, will also allow higher clock speeds.
Of course, it's a long time since the CPU was the bottleneck in a computer...
(The biggest reason to go for 64bit architecture is that it allows for more Data in and out of the CPU)
What we really need is faster storage. Much faster. And affordable...
(Flash drives are nice, but their Read/Write times aren't much better than normal HDDs. It's just the seek-times that have been chopped off)
Flash HDDs are still being designed as 8bit wide devices(or 16, or 32bits. Whatever...) with a normal SATA interface, because that's what PCs support.
(Flash memory has a finite Read/write speed alfter all)
Putting more memory in parallell inside the Flash HDD should speed it up significantly, but this will also require memory controllers capable of handling these wider datastreams and clocking them through the SATA interface.
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