Tag Archives: semiconductors

The Status of Moore’s Law: It’s Complicated

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Kahng says chipmakers may face a more immediate struggle with wiring in just a few years as they attempt to push chip density down past the 10-nm generation. Each copper wire requires a sheath containing barrier material to prevent the metal from leaching into surrounding material, as well as insulation to prevent it from interacting with neighboring wires. To perform effectively, this sheath must be fairly thick. This thickness limits how closely wires can be pushed together and forces the copper wires to shrink instead, dramatically driving up the resistance and delays and drastically lowering performance. Although researchers are exploring alternative materials, it’s unclear, Kahng says, whether they will be ready in time to keep up with Moore’s Law’s steady pace.

via The Status of Moore’s Law: It’s Complicated – IEEE Spectrum.

Persuading light to mix it up with matter

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Their findings suggest that it’s possible to alter the electronic properties of a material — for example, changing it from a conductor to a semiconductor — just by changing the laser beam’s polarization. Normally, to produce such dramatic changes in a material’s properties, “you have to do something violent to it,” Gedik says. “But in this case, it may be possible to do this just by shining light on it. That actually modifies how electrons move in this system. And when we do this, the light does not even get absorbed.”

via Persuading light to mix it up with matter – MIT News Office.

It will take some time to assess possible applications, Gedik says. But, he suggests, this could be a way of engineering materials for specific functions. “Suppose you want a material to do something — to conduct electricity, or to be transparent, for example. We usually do this by chemical means. With this new method, it may be possible to do this by simply shining light on the materials.”

New device stores electricity on silicon chips

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When the researchers tested the coated material they found that it had chemically stabilized the silicon surface. When they used it to make supercapacitors, they found that the graphene coating improved energy densities by over two orders of magnitude compared to those made from uncoated porous silicon and significantly better than commercial supercapacitors.

via New device stores electricity on silicon chips | Research News @ Vanderbilt | Vanderbilt University.

Scientists Demonstrate Ultra-Fast Magnetite Electrical Switch

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However, there’s a slight hitch to be overcome before fabbing magnetite computer chips is possible. To lock an electrical charge in place in the material, it has to be chilled to minus 190 degrees Celsius.

Kukreja said the next objective for the team will be to try out electrical switching with “more complex materials and room-temperature applications” through new experiments which “aim to identify exotic compounds and test new techniques to induce the switching and tap into other properties that are superior to modern-day silicon transistors.”

via Scientists Demonstrate Ultra-Fast Magnetite Electrical Switch | News & Opinion | PCMag.com.

Quantum-Tunneling Electrons Could Make Semiconductors Obsolete

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In traditional circuits, transistors are laid down in a bed of silicon that acts as an insulator to prevent crosstalk between circuits. In circuits based on quantum tunneling, silicon is replaced by nanotubes made of boron nitride and electrical pathways consisting of quantum dots—carefully placed bits of gold as small as three nanometers across (PDF).

via Quantum-Tunneling Electrons Could Make Semiconductors Obsolete.

Intel’s Haswell Takes A Major Step Forward; Integrates Voltage Regulator

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Haswell incorporates a refined VRM on-die that allows for multiple voltage rails and controls voltage for the CPU, on-die GPU, system I/O, integrated memory controller, as well as several other functions. Intel refers to this as a FIVR (Fully Integrated Voltage Regulator), and it apparently eliminates voltage ripple and is significantly more efficient than your traditional motherboard VRM. Added bonus? It’s 1/50th the size.

via Intel’s Haswell Takes A Major Step Forward; Integrates Voltage Regulator – HotHardware.

Scientists Discover New Atomic Technique to Charge Memory Chips

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Once the oxide materials, which are innately insulating, are transformed into a conducting state, the IBM experiments showed that the materials maintain a stable metallic state even when power to the device is removed. This non-volatile property means that chips using devices that operate using this novel phenomenon could be used to store and transport data in a more efficient, event-driven manner instead of requiring the state of the devices to be maintained by constant electrical currents.

via IBM News room – 2013-03-21 Made in IBM Labs: Scientists Discover New Atomic Technique to Charge Memory Chips – United States.

Magnetic logic makes for mutable chips

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A research group based at the Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST) in Seoul, South Korea, has developed a circuit that may get around these problems. The device, described in a paper published on Nature’s website on 30 January, uses magnetism to control the flow of electrons across a minuscule bridge of the semiconducting material indium antimonide (S. Joo et al. Nature http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature11817; 2013). It is “a new and interesting twist on how to implement a logic gate”, says Gian Salis, a physicist at IBM’s Zurich Research Laboratory in Switzerland.

via Magnetic logic makes for mutable chips : Nature News & Comment.

This seems like a revolutionary discovery if it can be manufactured relatively easily.  And then there’s this:

But Johnson notes that magnetism is already catching on in circuit design: some advanced devices are beginning to use a magnetic version of random access memory, a type of memory that has historically been built only with conventional transistors. “I think a shift is already under way,” he says.

Research discovery could revolutionise semiconductor manufacture

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Instead of starting from a silicon wafer or other substrate, as is usual today, researchers have made it possible for the structures to grow from freely suspended nanoparticles of gold in a flowing gas.

via Research discovery could revolutionise semiconductor manufacture – Lund University.

The structures are referred to as nanowires or nanorods. The breakthrough for these semiconductor structures came in 2002 and research on them is primarily carried out at Lund, Berkeley and Harvard universities.

Moving from love-hate to hate-hate

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Since the early 2000s, Samsung has been involved in designing of Apple’s A-range of chips as the main manufacturer. Samsung technologies contributed in the development of the A6 predecessors A5 and A5X, thanks to a broad agreement between the two companies. It now appears that the structure of the deal has been dramatically adjusted.

via Moving from love-hate to hate-hate.

As the patent war deepens, the two companies have seen a faster deterioration of their business partnership. Apple has already reduced its memory chip orders from Samsung for the iPhone 5 as it intends to widen its supply chain.

Unlike memory chips, which just read and write data, application processors control an entire computing system, therefore processor chips are more profitable.