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Next
Event
Friday, August 22, 2008, 07:00 PM: Simulations of Society with Loren Cobb
Loren Cobb will present his peculiar 15-year journey into sociological model-making for various military entities, including US Southern Command, the Swedish Ministry of Defence, the British Ministry of Defence, the United Nations, and a miscellany of Latin American countries (Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, ...).
More...
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Semiconductors
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A lot of industry people in the know are predicting that Moore's Law will come to an end sometime in the next decade. Starting with the current leading-edge 45nm process technology, chipmakers are looking to deliver three more shrinks until silicon-based transistors run up against quantum mechanical effects. Most vendors have plans in place for 32nm and 22nm processors using UV lithography. The next stop is 16nm, but the general consensus is that it will have to be implemented with something other than CMOS-based material -- perhaps SiGe or graphene. At 9 or 10 nanometers, quantum tunneling starts to become a real problem, so even more futuristic approaches, like molecular electronics or spintronics, will be required.
There's no guarantee that the development of these more advanced technologies will obey a Moore's Law timeline, which was based on the progression of two-dimensional semiconductors.
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Intel will launch its first 45nm chips made with reinvented transistors that use a new Hafnium-based high-k metal gate recipe. Take a look inside Intel's 45nm factories where these chips get made. See the many layers or floors of the factory and the automated shuttles that take the wafers from one step to another to ultimately produce millions of Intel's 45nm chips. These buildings are some of the cleanest in the world and so large that 17 football fields can fit inside!
Video, 7:38
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Parallel computing used to be reserved for big science and engineering projects, but in two years that's all changed. Even laptops and hand-helds use parallel processors. Unfortunately,
the software hasn't kept pace. Kathy Yelick, Director of the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center at Berkeley Lab, describes the resulting chaos and the computing community's efforts to develop exciting applications that take advantage of tens or hundreds of processors on a single chip.
Video, 1:00:00
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Researchers reported on a way to design circuits that should work even when many of the nanotubes in them are twisted and misaligned.
Nanotubes tend to grow with unpredictable kinks and bends that can cause bad wiring connections. The resarchers came to the conclusion that engineers will have to design circuits that will work regardless of where and how the tubes lie.
They came up with a single circuit element—a NAND gate—that was immune from the vagaries of its underlying nanotube layout. From that single element, they abstracted and generalized the math to come up with an algorithm that they say can guarantee a working design for any circuit element, despite the presence of misaligned tubes.
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Harnessing quantum interference enables single aromatic annulene molecules to function as transistors.
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Room-temperature single-electron transistors are realized within individual metallic single-wall carbon nanotube molecules. The devices feature a short (down to ~20 nanometers) nanotube section that is created by inducing local barriers into the tube with an atomic force microscope. Coulomb charging is observed at room temperature, with an addition energy of 120 millielectron volts, which substantially exceeds the thermal energy. At low temperatures, we resolve the quantum energy levels corresponding to the small island. We observe unconventional power-law dependencies in the measured transport properties for which we suggest a resonant tunneling Luttinger-liquid mechanism.
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Cellphones, microchips, cars, even iPhones—there's virtually no high-tech Western product that China's cloners can't copy. Pretty soon, you might even prefer their work.
The little gadget was bootleg gold, a secret treasure I'd spent months tracking down. The miniOne looked just like Apple's iPhone, down to the slick no-button interface. But it was more. It ran popular mobile software that the iPhone wouldn't. It worked with nearly every worldwide cellphone carrier, not just AT&T, and not only in the U.S. It promised to cost half as much as the iPhone and be available to 10 times as many consumers. The miniOne's first news teases—a forum posting, a few spy shots, a product announcement that vanished after a day—generated a frenzy of interest online. Was it real? When would it go on sale? And most intriguing, could it really be even better than the iPhone?
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Transistors are the basic building blocks of integrated circuits. To use nanotubes in future circuits it is essential to be able to make transistors from them. We have successfully fabricated and tested nanotube transistors using individual multi-wall or single-wall nanotubes as the channel of a field-effect transistor (FET).
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BBC program where they interview Gordon Moore and various other
people from the silicon valley semiconductor industry. This is a very
introductory program. For those of you who are deeply familiar with
Moore's Law, you won't find much new here. But for those of you not
so familiar, this program will explain some of the issues involved,
and give you some sense of the chaos and craziness that creates our
smooth growth in computer power.
Audio, 27 minutes
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MIT professor Neil Gershenfeld offers a glimpse at life after the digital revolution by sharing some of the projects created in Fab Labs - low-cost fabrication labs that encourage invention and production on a local level. (Recorded February 2006 in Monterey, CA. Duration: 18:04)
Video, 18:04
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 Photons rarely interact—which makes it challenging to build all-optical devices in which one light signal controls another. Even in nonlinear optical media, in which two beams can interact because of their influence on the medium's refractive index, this interaction is weak at low light levels. Here, we propose a novel approach to realizing strong nonlinear interactions at the single-photon level, by exploiting the strong coupling between individual optical emitters and propagating surface plasmons confined to a conducting nanowire. We show that this system can act as a nonlinear two-photon switch for incident photons propagating along the nanowire, which can be coherently controlled using conventional quantum-optical techniques. Furthermore, we discuss how the interaction can be tailored to create a single-photon transistor, where the presence (or absence) of a single incident photon in a 'gate' field is sufficient to allow (or prevent) the propagation of subsequent 'signal' photons along the wire.
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Multicore chips could bring about the biggest change in computing since the microprocessor. By Brian Hayes.
The pace of change in computer technology can be breathtaking—and sometimes infuriating. You bring home a new computer, and before you can get it plugged in you're hearing rumors of a faster and cheaper model. In the 30 years since the microprocessor first came on the scene, computer clock speeds have increased by a factor of a thousand (from a few megahertz to a few gigahertz) and memory capacity has grown even more (from kilobytes to gigabytes).
Through all this frenzy of upgrades and speed bumps, one aspect of computer hardware has remained stubbornly resistant to change. Until recently, that new computer you brought home surely had only one CPU, or central processing unit—the computer-within-the-computer where programs are executed and calculations are performed.
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Silicon wafers are loaded into various chip-making tools -- some of which cost more than $10 million each -- through a complex routing system that runs on mechanized tracks above the tools. D1D uses what's known as a "ballroom" design, meaning the clean room floor is wide open, lacking walls within the facility where dirt can gather, Horwath said.
The air within the clean room is constantly refreshed and maintained at a cleanliness level known as Class 10, Horwath said. The air is even cleaner within the stackers, which transport silicon wafers from tool to tool. That air is kept at Class 1 status, meaning only three particles of dirt measuring 0.3 microns in size are allowed within a cubic foot of air.
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We give a detailed discussion of the Quantum Interference Effect Transistor (QuIET), a proposed device which exploits interference between electron paths through aromatic molecules to modulate current flow. In the off state, perfect destructive interference stemming from the molecular symmetry blocks current, while in the on state, current is allowed to flow by locally introducing either decoherence or elastic scattering. Details of a model calculation demonstrating the efficacy of the QuIET are presented, and various fabrication scenarios are proposed, including the possibility of using conducting polymers to connect the QuIET with multiple leads.
PDF, 12 pages
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Scientists at the Technion–Israel Institute of Technology have harnessed the power of DNA to create a self-assembling nanoscale transistor, the building block of electronics. The research is a crucial step in the development of nanoscale devices.
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China is likely to unveil the first ultra mobile PC using domestic microprocessor technology with chip design technologies transferred from the US firm AMD, posing challenges to companies like Intel.
PKUnity Microsystems, backed by Peking University, yesterday demonstrated the prototype computer developed with X86 technologies from AMD, running on Microsoft Windows XP system, which means the company has full capability to make commercial PCs with locally developed processors.
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Intel Corporation today announced plans to build a 300-millimeter (mm) wafer fabrication facility (fab) in the coastal Northeast China city of Dalian in Liaoning Province. The $2.5 billion investment for the factory designated Fab 68 will become Intel's first wafer fab in Asia and adds significant investment to Intel's existing operations in China.
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 How fast is your personal computer?
When people ask this question, they are typically referring to the frequency of a minuscule clock inside the computer, a crystal oscillator that sets the basic rhythm used throughout the machine. In a computer with a speed of one gigahertz, for example, the crystal "ticks" a billion times a second. Every action of the computer takes place in tiny steps, each a billionth of a second long. A simple transfer of data may take only one step; complex calculations may take many steps. All operations, however, must begin and end according to the clock's timing signals.
The use of a central clock also creates problems. As speeds have increased, distributing the timing signals has become more and more difficult. Present-day transistors can process data so quickly that they can accomplish several steps in the time that it takes a wire to carry a signal from one side of the chip to the other. Keeping the rhythm identical in all parts of a large chip requires careful design and a great deal of electrical power. Wouldn't it be nice to have an alternative?
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AMD and IBM this week announced they had produced a working test chip utilizing Extreme Ultraviolet (EUV) lithography to produce the first layer of metal connections across the entire chip.
EUV allows for using a wavelength of 13.5 nanometers much shorter than today’s 193nm lithography techniques.
EUV lithography will be fully qualified for production by 2016, when it makes the move to 22nm manufacturing.
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Exciting news from IBM and partners about a prototype technology that could make memory chips 500 times faster in the future.
It uses a technique where a material named GS can be swapped from an amorphous state to a crystalline one through being heating. In this case, via an electric current.
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Memory maker Macronix International is working on a new Flash structure that will help break down barriers faced by today's floating gate technology when it scales to the 45 nanometer node. Because the SONOS structure is compatible with a generic logic process, it could help push embedded flash into applications long considered out of bounds because of cost, such as SoCs for consumer electronics.
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Stephen Chou believes he has come up with a way to keep the semiconductor industry rolling forward, and it resembles something Henry VIII might have worn on his royal vestments.
Chou is one of the prime advocates of "imprint lithography," a process that involves pressing an ornate template into a liquefied substrate to create a circuit pattern, similar to how a signet ring worked. In experiments, he has managed to create features measuring 6 nanometers, one-fifteenth the size on today's chips.
"Ten years ago, people said, 'This is crazy. You will never use technology to make things this small.'" Chou said.
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Fraunhofer IPMS shows a full color laser projection system based on its own two dimensional micro scanning mirror. The system contains an ultra compact projection head and a separate laser and signal processing unit.
It allows the projection of arbitrary images and video sequences with a geometrical resolution of 640 x 480 pixels, 256 brightness levels per pixel and elementary color, and 50 hertz frame rate.
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To produce even smaller feature sizes, researchers created an interference pattern using light from a laser with a wavelength of 351 nm.
The pattern consists of alternating light and dark zones repeating every 200 nm. This allowed them to etch 25-nm lines into a silicon wafer, each 175 nm apart.
On the grid
They then repeated the process three times, each time shifting the interference pattern by 50 nm and etching another 25-nm groove. The resulting grid has alternating 25-nm stripes and grooves.
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Few computing technologies from the late 1970s endure today, with one notable exception: the fundamental marching orders for the vast majority of the world's computers.
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I was recently embroiled in controversy after writing a technical report about a new Chinese-designed microprocessor. The controversy was inflamed by dodgy Internet news sites, and it obscured the most important conclusion of my article: that China is capable of designing microprocessors as sophisticated as any in the world.
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China's Semiconductor contract manufacturer.
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VIA offers a range of power efficient processors for the x86 Personal Electronics and embedded device markets. Providing industry leading miniaturization, low power consumption and compatibility with a complete range of feature rich VIA digital media chipsets, VIA processors are powering a new wave of innovation in the embedded, mobile and consumer electronics markets.
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Scientists have again broken their own speed record for the world's fastest transistor. With a frequency of 845 gigahertz, their latest device is approximately 300 gigahertz faster than transistors built by other research groups, and approaches the goal of a terahertz device.
Made from indium phosphide and indium gallium arsenide, "the new transistor utilizes a pseudomorphic grading of the base and collector regions."
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Laser technology company, Novalux of Sunnyvale, California USA, reports selling its Sunnyvale wafer fabrication facility to an undisclosed Silicon Valley company. The transaction closed November 21, 2007. Novalux currently grows its epitaxial wafers at its main Sunnyvale facility. The company says it will shift fabrication and processing of the laser arrays to large capacity contract fabricators in Taiwan. The company indicated that this step is key to begin mass production of its laser diode arrays.
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Researchers recently announced a new flash memory chip that can hold twice as much data as before, and without an increase in its footprint on a circuit board. They were able to double the data capacity by building chips with multiple layers of silicon, creating 3-D structures. By combining today's chip-making processes with the new 3-D design, they could build a one-terabit flash chip composed of eight layers of silicon.
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The goal of is to demonstrate the feasibility of Molecular Imprints Inc's so-called step and flash imprint lithography (S-FIL) technology for IC production and related applications at the 32-nm node and beyond.
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Researchers have tested its first 65nm multi-gate finFET architecture. The name finFET comes from the fin-looking source/drain regions on the field-effect transistor. The 65nm circuitry tested by researchers contains more than 3,000 active transistors fabricated in three-dimensional multi-gate technology.
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Laser TV was supposed to debut this Christmas and relegate the humble plasma to the scrap heap, but now it is unlikely that Australians will be able to buy one before at least 2009.
The technology's main proponent, Mitsubishi Digital Electronics, has told the television industry to expect a major laser TV announcement at a US trade show in January, but it is not yet clear how long after that they will go on sale there.
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Multilevel cell (MLC) NAND flash technology creates memory that is more dense and more affordable by allowing each memory cell to store 2 bits of information, effectively doubling capacity. Current generations of MLC flash overcame data reliability, performance and flash management problems that were inherent in early designs and have gained many design wins as a result, especially in mobile handsets and other consumer electronics.
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People love tiny gadgets like the iPod or Motorola Q. But they don't like staring at tiny screens, especially now that handhelds have the power to run 3-D games and display television-quality video.
Tiny, laser-based projectors could transform these pocket-size devices into full-blown entertainment systems by shining images onto walls, tabletops or the backs of airplane seats. In a bright room, the handheld projectors would produce images about as bright and big as a 10-inch laptop screen, said Greg Niven, the vice president of marketing at laser maker Novalux. "If you turn the lights out, you could make the projection 10 feet."
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