Posted on 02/22/2015 4:47:42 PM PST by ckilmer
Eventually, the conventional ways of manufacturing microprocessors, graphics chips, and other silicon components will run out of steam. According to Intel researchers speaking at the ISSCC conference this week, however, we still have headroom for a few more years.
Intel plans to present several papers this week at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference in San Francisco, one of the key academic conferences for papers on chip design. Intel senior fellow Mark Bohr will also appear on a panel Monday night to discuss the challenges of moving from today's 14nm chips to the 10nm manufacturing node and beyond.
(Excerpt) Read more at pcworld.com ...
Will they be able to make chips from graphene?
Intel is currently at the 14 nanometer mark.
“In a conference call with reporters, Bohr said that Intel believes that the current pace of semiconductor technology can continue beyond 10nm technology (expected in 2016) or so, and that 7nm manufacturing (expected in 2018) can be done without moving to expensive, esoteric manufacturing methods like ultraviolet lasers. “
Back in November another article was posted on this topic.
Intel Sees Path to Extend Moore’s Law to 7nm
Nov 24, 2014 2:08 PM EST
By Michael J. Miller
http://forwardthinking.pcmag.com/none/329835-intel-sees-path-to-extend-moore-s-law-to-7nm
Will they be able to make chips from graphene?
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Good question. Don’t know. There’s been a huge amount of smoke concerning graphene but so far its been just smoke. In any case the chip manufacturers won’t jump from current methods until they have to. That will come in about four years according to the article
IIRC, 7nm is five Si atoms.
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Thanks. For I surely have no understanding of the underlying physical laws. Do you know why 5 silicon atoms and not 4 or 6 is the limit?
You gotta problem with that?
The last camera I worked on printed 1 micron.
They’re getting better.
It seems like microprocessors have been getting smaller and faster for quite some time now.
Dang, for a second there thought they were talking about using dark matter and dark energy, phew :)
Thanks. For I surely have no understanding of the underlying physical laws. Do you know why 5 silicon atoms and not 4 or 6 is the limit?
Basically what happens is that there are doublings not in terms of feature length but in terms of area (7 squared is about half of 10 squared).
So it says that there just aren’t too many doublings left.
Without a high yield, high production process using Extreme UV, the semiconductor area is in big trouble.
It seems like microprocessors have been getting smaller and faster for quite some time now.
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Yeah cell phones have the same power as laptops of 8 years ago.
“Today, your cell phone has more computer power than all of NASA back in 1969, when it placed two astronauts on the moon.”
Deep Blue is another supercomputer that you might have heard of. It is the machine best known for winning against world chess champion Garry Kasparov with a score of 2:1 in a 6-game match. That happened on May 11, 1997, when Deep Blue was the 259th most powerful computer in the world. It boasted a performance figure of 11.38 GFLOPS and could evaluate 200 million positions on the chessboard each second (although still not good enough to run Crysis, we suppose). Today, some 17 years later, the ARM Mali-T628MP6 GPU inside the Exynos-based Samsung Galaxy S5 outputs 142 GFLOPS. And the 192-core GPU on the Tegra K1 SoC produces an even more impressive peak of 364 GFLOPS. Sure, these might not be superior to Deep Blue when it comes to playing chess, but in terms of brute, number-crunching power, these mobile graphics processors stand stronger.
So yeah, technology is definitely advancing, and it is doing so at a rapid pace. What takes a supercomputer to calculate today will most likely be a piece of cake for the smartphones (or whatever they evolve into) that we’ll be using in 2020, just like today’s smartphones have the processing potential of a vintage supercomputer. What we’ll be investing this computational power into, however, is a whole different topic.
Will they be able to make chips from graphene?
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The last I looked, not a single commercial product is based on graphene. The only money being made is supplying graphene to researchers, but I think many make their own.
It’s all so crazy. Who woulda thought 10 years ago this was possible.
Science scares me. I am a simple caveman.
Search the keyword “3Dprinting” to see articles on graphene.
I think Moore’s law ended a few years ago. Microprocessors that came out a few years ago are still expensive and the newer chips aren’t much more powerful.
Ok the part that I do understand without understanding is that when the chips are too small the light or electrons bleed through the walls of the circuits so there’s interference.
what I don’t understand is how they can get smaller without increasing the bleed.
stronger walls? more finely etched circuits?
It's not esoteric until they're using Octarine lasers on dark matter/energy.
Without a high yield, high production process using Extreme UV, the semiconductor area is in big trouble.
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According to the article they can continue to use the same manufacturing process down to 7 nanometers or until 2018. Then they have to make the great leap out of current manufacturing processes to something else? — to get smaller...
What that will be is anyone’s guess but likely they’ve been working on perfecting this leap for a decade or more.
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