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Forums - PC - Beyond 32nm: the future of processors revealed

Gilgamesh on 26 July 2009

"Big news. The IBM Technology Alliance has announced its 28nm process and the first chips should be rolling off the lines by 2010 with ARM systems-on-a-chip (SoC) among the first. Are you excited? Yes? No? At the very least you should be impressed.

Despite endless predictions of insurmountable technical hurdles the semiconductor business has continued to trace Moore's predictions and are now rapidly heading towards the weird world of nanoelectronics."

http://www.techradar.com/news/computing-components/processors/beyond-32nm-the-future-of-processors-revealed-618014?src=rss&attr=all



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Squilliam on 26 July 2009

Interesting stuff.



Tease.

IllegalPaladin on 26 July 2009

Give me some nanomachines!



NJ5 on 26 July 2009

Wow, 28 is less than 32! I'm utterly amazed!

:P



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sguy78 on 26 July 2009

No more overheating.



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Squall_Leonhart on 26 July 2009

Bring on the cheaper electronics (potentially lol)



D_Boy on 27 July 2009

Well well....so we are nearly down to the pico process....1000pm=1nm



NJ5 on 28 July 2009
D_Boy said:
Well well....so we are nearly down to the pico process....1000pm=1nm

As the article says, pico processes are not gonna happen with silicon-based circuits:

This is where things get a bit weird as materials stop dancing to the rules of classical physics and Schrödinger's wave-equation pops up. Basically, it gets hard to stop the electrons breaching a barrier that's only a few nanometres thick no matter what material you use. This is also at the edge of commercial fabrication, nothing can currently be consistently and reliably made this small.

Toshiba has built a prototype memory module with 15nm lines, but such sizes are still lab experiments. Next stop on the ladder down is the 11nm process, predicted for 2022 by the ITRS, although, again, Intel is more buoyant and talks of 2015.

This is the expected limit of CMOS and may well mean silicon chips are no longer silicon. At this level dielectric thickness could be down to one atom, making it difficult to keep anything going where you want it to go.

 



My Mario Kart Wii friend code: 2707-1866-0957

Rath on 28 July 2009

I'm pretty sure that they're going to have a hell of a lot of difficulty getting much smaller than that, there is an actual physical limit to how small they can get it. Once you get to a certain size too many electrons will tunnel across the gaps and the circuit will become useless.

I'm amazed they actually got it down to 28nm, at that scale you'd think the Casimir effect would cause all sorts of trouble.



sguy78 on 30 July 2009

The tech is crazy for this.