IBM Scientists Find New Way to Shrink Transistors | Hacker News Reader

IBM Scientists Find New Way to Shrink Transistors

nytimes.com

94 pointssew12 comments

> By simply swapping carbon nanotube transistors for conventional ones in a > simulated IBM microprocessor, they were able to increase speeds by a factor > of seven or, alternatively, achieve power savings almost as significant, said > Wilfried Haensch, an IBM physicist who is a member of the research group.

In technology, one often comes across the use of the word "simply" to refer to something that's actually quite complicate (see the Druid docs[0]) but this is quite a doozy.

[0] http://cse.google.com/cse?cx=004325268462231820898:e4htgtatb...

It's crazy to think that a major breakthrough like this with a factor of seven increase in transistor density is little more than four years of progress as measured by Moore's Law.

> It's crazy to think that a major breakthrough like this with a factor of seven increase in transistor density is little more than four years of progress as measured by Moore's Law.

In a single step, by switching to an experimental new process. It seems likely that, if that process pans out, it'll then get years of extensive refinement to improve both yield and density.

I don't know about that. They were talking about line widths of 40 atoms. Another four years (factor of seven improvement) takes you to 6 atoms; another four years (factor of 7 improvement) takes you to one atom. At that point you're not talking about a "carbon nanotube" any longer - it's just a row of carbon atoms, and you still can't improve it any further.

I mean, yes, there will be process improvements. The article talked about 28 atoms as the next step. But there are fundamental limits, and they aren't very far away...

(I could be overstating the case here, in that transistor density may scale as the square of the line width, rather than linearly with it. The point about fundamental limits still stands, however.)

There will always be a hard limit, but one thing I could see us looking back on and finding weird is that we have a single layer of transistors. If we could build more complex 3D structures I'd expect we could see vast improvements.

Not part of Moore's Law but there are also

1. Significant storage improvements, and bringing the storage closer to the processing (or the other way around) which massively improves the overall speed.

2. Better chip design. Not knocking the current designers, but it'd be foolish to assume we have the theoretical optimum chip designs.

3. Cost. Sure, you're not going to improve every use case but what if my motherboard was just a big layer of cpus with non-volatile huge caches because it cost pennies? Particularly when we hit some larger limits, we'd be likely to see that current best design being produced by lots of people and getting cheaper and cheaper.

Along with 3. comes more custom designed chips. If we can get the cost of design and fabrication down, we can speed things up by having a bunch of chips for specific functions.

Afaik the main problem with 3D structures is heat dissipation, which limits this approach somewhat. But nanotubes might help with this as well maybe.

Maybe we should copy the brain design? Fold it and put cooling liquid around?

Moore's Law is a harsh mistress.

Countless breakthroughs have already been marshalled to bring us where we are. More are the order of the day.

The real challenge with CNTFETs is mass production. Without that, the roadmap doesn't budge.

The space smallest space between chemical synapses is ~20nm. It helps put the size of these transistors in perspective.

Coming out in 2016. Moore's Law. The suspense movie with a surprise twist that you never saw coming.

I feel like this headline could read "Moore's Law To Be Kept Alive For Slightly Longer".

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