Posted on 01/31/2003 6:46:49 PM PST by Ernest_at_the_Beach
With a $15 million grant from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Purdue will establish a center to design a new generation of compact, high-performance computers that will free spaceships from their dependence on ground-based intelligence.
The NASA center is one of two being created at the Birck Nanotechnology Center planned on Purdue's campus in West Lafayette, Ind. The other collaboration will be funded with $10.5 million from the National Science Foundation and focus on creating computer simulations of new projects.
Purdue's research for NASA will lean heavily upon the NSF computer simulation center, and both projects will be aided by scientists from other universities, including Northwestern and the University of Illinois.
By tapping into discoveries related to how electronic components can be built on the molecular scale, Purdue's NASA effort aims to design computers that pack more intelligence into a smaller space.
"The team will be looking at several novel, unconventional technologies," said Meyya Meyyappan, nanotechnology director at NASA's Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, Calif. "These technologies have applications for military and commercial systems as well.
"For all decisions to be made right at the spacecraft instead of at mission control here on Earth requires enormous computing power – orders of magnitude more than what we have today. These computers will have to come in small packages because you can't haul a bunch of mainframes into space."
Mark Lundstrom, who will direct Purdue's computer simulation center, said transistors on computer chips are about as small as they can get. "That means the only way to make progress is to start using the third dimension, to start stacking layers on top of each other," he said.
Supriyo Datta, who will direct the NASA project at Purdue, said each layer will provide a different task for the chip.
"The bottom layer will generally perform the same functions performed by digital equipment--things like digital processing in your computer or digital signal processing in your wireless phone," Datta said. "The layers on the top of that first layer will probably add different capabilities."
The new programs will be housed in the center named for Michael Birck, a founder of Naperville-based Tellabs Inc., and his wife, Katherine, who donated $30 million to build it.
"Open the pod bay doors, HAL!"
Horse pucky. I've been hearing that noise for decades now. They keep saying "it's as small as it's going to get" and then they find a way to make it half the size one more time. Then they do it again. I've seen it with my own eyes again and again. When I started designing circuits the rules were five micron wide wires, five micron long transistor gates and five microns space between metal wires, one metal only. Now we have TSMC .13 micron, eight metal technology available to the general public, and Intel and IBM have .09 and .1 micron technology right now, with .06 around the corner. "As small as it's going to get". Yeah right.
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