IBM announces $3B research initiative
electroiq.com
electroiq.com
What is more interesting than semiconductor base used is lithography process. Deep UV (immersion, using refraction of medium such as water) lithography currently used is showing its limits for ever smaller features. So, they came up with Extreme UV lithography which uses mirrors to project features onto surface, because at that short wavelength everything is opaque. Applied materials has a machine with EUVL apparently (there is one on their site and a nice video with description) as well as ASML (their machine reportedly costs $88 million).
There is a probability that with new semiconductor base (group III-V) there will be a reset back to 22nm or similar and a race down to bottom once again. We'll see.
"Gallium arsenide is the material of the future and will always remain so"
Also don't forget multi-patterning, which is what has allowed us to get to 14nm in the first place. I reckon Intel will ditch their immersion lithography which they love so dearly and move on to other techniques, which is when I will actually get excited about these techniques. X-Ray Lithography is also being investigated and seems to hold some promise.
The crazy thing about all these advancements is that no one knows what the future will hold, and right now we are essentially living under a renaissance era, witnessing the death of Silicon. I just hope the stuff I'm working on succeeds so I can make that cash money.
What are you working on - graphene? In any case, very very interesting times ahead. Projections are that 2020 will see the last of the cycles (5nm) for Silicon. And that's only a few years away!
E-beam lithography has been the work horse for research in fabrication for decades now. You can't get better resolution than E-beam lithography. The wavelength of an electron at 5kV acceleration is something like 0.017 nm. There are some crazy people who are trying to make E-beam systems for production processes (multiple beams, etc.), but I don't think E-beam will ever see use outside of research.
I am working on a special type of transistor that is similar to this: http://arxiv.org/pdf/cond-mat/0401162.pdf
Grapehene FET research is for peasants
It might be due to my limited scope of knowledge, but how would one scale E-beam to a production capacity anyways?
Thanks for the link. I'll have to cross-read it with a lot of info though since it's 'a bit' over my head. I'm already lost at 1D and how it relates to, well, anything. I still can't warp my head around 1D geometry.
Banks and big government won't switch to trust a startup after working with IBM for twenty years. The risk of a failing startup and buyout is a real risk. Even should you do such transition, it will take a long time. Maybe for small components you can switch within months.
I like PG's advise to startup founders: go out there, sell your product, do the necessary customer supports (do demo, train users, troubleshoot, etc) and stop the hype because big companies like IBM and VMWare can sell their product with ease. I think the right attitude is to start small, build the reputation and make progress.
(they'll keep the shareholders in check by a mixture of nonsense and honesty about why IBM really needs to do so much fun fundamental research. if all C-level people talk the talk the same, and otherwise don't suck at what they do, then i bet they can keep the shareholders from getting all too grumpy about spending $3B on something that might pay off in 20 years, maybe)
I'd like to know which of the labs are getting this money and what hiring they are doing contrasted with any downsizing they previously did.
As the leader in advanced schemes that point beyond traditional silicon-based computing, IBM holds over 500 patents for technologies that will drive advancements at 7nm and beyond silicon — more than twice the nearest competitor.
I would have guessed that Intel was the big player here in the low-level hardware space. What has put IBM at that position, besides sheer age?
IBM is one of the very few companies that does fundamental research with a time-horizon of decades, and not just one product cycle.
Intel and IBM have a long standing patent cross-licensing arrangement in place.
What happens when computers stop getting faster?
There's no obvious successor to CMOS on the foreseeable horizon, so it's good to see that IBM and others are searching for solutions.
The history of performance speedup hasn't been solely due to doubling the transistors. Other types of architectural improvements in memory, buses, parallelism, multiple cores/threads have yielded performance doubling or more. Memory access has always been a huge latency and there are lots of ways to improve that without just making the transistors smaller.
We have a lot of work to do still! The majority of our computing has been on the x86 architecture, which basically stems from the 8080 which was designed in the mid 70s. We can still discover new and better architectures and materials. It's just the standard shrinkage of IC's that was the basis of Moore's Law originally has reached its limits.
(1) As the ROI on R&D falls, R&D will be drastically cut and the industry will become even more commoditized. Less R&D spending means chips get cheaper.
(2) Capital equipment will last longer because it won't need to be replaced with new versions every couple years. Fewer equipment purchases means chips get cheaper.
(3) As performance/$ wanes, demand will fall in the short term. At first prices may crash if capacity is overbuilt, but in the medium term, production will stabilize at a smaller level than before. Because of economies of scale, prices will be higher at this smaller scale. (I believe this is what happened to the RAM market a few years ago.) This force may cause chip prices to rise.
(4) As software continues to improve, the value of chips will rise, even as the chips themselves stagnate. This will cause the market to grow, and economies of scale will drive prices down.
(5) As has been happening for years, the industry will continue to consolidate. Less competition between producers will mean higher profit margins and higher prices.
Overall, (1), (2), and (4) will lower chip prices and (3) and (5) will raise chip prices. But I think the overall trend will be lower prices, though perhaps not as the drastic rate to which we've become accustomed.
That's a fairly big assumption.
But Xen is smaller than Linux.
Software will have to stop getting slower. >;-)
It's slightly ranty but not entirely. First spreadsheets were used to fit in 64k.
For the average user an old laptop would do fine, in that area progress is self fulfilling marketing prophecy.
For enterprises .. maybe (the few I worked at had very low grade network and database infrastructure, so opportunity to evolve)
Hard science and medicine, they deserve smart and fast tech.
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/login.jsp?tp=&arnumber=597698...
(In analog domain, your resolution is limited by SNR, in digital, it's limited by number of bits).
As far as I know, our neurons are belived to have analogic interfaces, thus they could not be interfaced by a digital circuit. If somebody found out that they are digital, that'd be very newsworth, at least for me.